


Murder is hardly a substitute for forward planning

by dogandmonkeyshow



Series: Unforgivable Things [4]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Case Fic, Espionage, Gen, Murder, Post-Episode: s03e03 His Last Vow, There and Back Again, not TAB-compliant, not s04-compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-03
Updated: 2016-12-08
Packaged: 2018-08-28 18:36:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 52,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8457859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dogandmonkeyshow/pseuds/dogandmonkeyshow
Summary: "Vengeance is the least I would expect from you, brother."

  "Murder is hardly a substitute for forward planning. But I suppose in a pinch it will suffice."
 While grieving the death of one friend, Sherlock investigates the murder of another. Along the way he discovers schemes, deception, treason, and to his surprise, reconciliation.





	1. You keep your gun filed under “G”?

**Author's Note:**

> Again, much, much thanks to the ever-patient and staunch dioscureantwins, for her assistance wrestling this beast into shape.

In the end, Sherlock was glad that it had been Lestrade who broke the news to John. Lestrade was, deep down, a compassionate man. He knew how to do it the correct way, empathetic while maintaining the requisite professional distance. Owing to the nature of his work, he already possessed a well-honed repertoire for communicating death. Sherlock knew that this was best for everyone. 

John would not want Sherlock's rage. John would feel compelled to console him, as if he were the principal mourner instead of John himself, the man who had just lost almost everything he valued in the world.

Sherlock paced from one end of 221B to the other long enough to draw Mrs Hudson up the stairs, clutching her hip and demanding to know what he was on about. And Sherlock was presented with a predicament: did he tell her about Mary and the baby? Perhaps he could have Lestrade tell everyone they knew on his behalf? Even in his own head Sherlock knew that that was the coward's way out.

“Something has happened.”

“Oh, what now?” Her tone was still irritated.

“Perhaps you should sit down.” _Yes, that's the form, isn't it?_ For some reason, people were supposed to receive upsetting news while sitting, as if they were at risk of fainting or something equally ridiculous.

“Sherlock, what's going on?” She clasped her hands in front of her mouth before continuing with remarkable prescience. “Is it Mary? Or the baby? Oh no—”

“They're dead.” The words leapt out of his mouth before he had the chance to tame them. Mrs Hudson began to sink onto the sofa and before he could catch her the first tears were running down her cheeks. A strange moan escaped from behind her hands and it seemed to fling open some long-locked cupboard in the back of Sherlock's mind, as he immediately sat down next to her. Before he knew what he was doing, he had an arm around her shoulders, and had drawn her against his side.

He waited while she sobbed and he repressed a sigh at the realisation his entire day was going to be like this. Molly. His parents. John and Mary's colleagues at the clinic. John's drunken, adulterous sister would probably need to be told. While Mrs Hudson soaked his shoulder, Sherlock forced himself to devise a more effective manner for spreading the information around. Taking an even more cowardly option and sending text messages would hardly suffice. Perhaps he should just quote Lestrade at them all.

It was too soon, and probably not at all productive to start thinking about why it had happened. Lestrade had refused to give him any details, but Sherlock knew it had been no accident, regardless of what the Sussex Constabulary had said. Mary's past had caught up with her. But how? 

Mycroft.

Mrs Hudson squeaked as Sherlock's arm reflexively crushed her tighter. 

It had to be Mycroft. Who else could it possibly be?

Once Mrs Hudson had taken herself and her wet tissues off to her own flat, Sherlock wondered which loathsome task he should essay next: delivering the news to their circle of acquaintance or trying to pin Mycroft down. The former had no prospect of anything other than misery, while the latter might at least provide an opportunity for cathartic exercise of his anger, so he allowed himself the indulgence.

Sherlock wasn't surprised that it took him four tries to get his brother on the line; the man must have known this call was coming and was dodging him. Just as he was thinking he might have to make a trip to Whitehall, Mycroft finally picked up. The connection was open for one tenth of a second when Sherlock began to weigh in.

“What have you done?”

“What do you mean?”

 _I cannot believe you haven't even bothered to come up with an excuse or a half-decent lie._ Sherlock spat into the phone, “You know exactly what I mean. Mary's dead, Mycroft. And the baby. Your friends killed her.”

“Yes, I did hear something about that. I thought to call tomorrow to—”

“You did this, you _bastard_.”

The sigh that prefaced Mycroft's response had Sherlock seeing red. “Why would I have done it? Give this some thought, brother mine: why would I have to lift a finger either way when you'd already done everything in your power to ensure that the people who wanted her dead found her?”

“What the hell are you talking about? I had nothing to do with this. Stop trying to shift the blame—”

“What did you think would happen when you shot Magnussen? Did you expect a parade? A knighthood?” While he'd expected the sarcastic snap in the man's voice, denying all responsibility, Sherlock couldn't believe even Mycroft's narcissism could lead to the belief that he'd been wronged by Sherlock pointing this out to him. The dismissive tone didn't change as his brother continued. “Did you think this would be brushed under the carpet, as well? No one could have covered this up, not with a victim like Magnussen—”

“Victim.” Sherlock snorted. “What the hell are you talking about? This has nothing to do with Magnussen. That was months ago.”

“Don't be stupid, Sherlock—”

“Stop trying to wriggle out of it. I know you're behind this, somehow. It's got your—”

“—for heaven's sake. Think. No, don't interrupt. For once in your life, apply the logic I know you're capable of to your own life. When you shot him, in effect, you fired a box of flares into the sky and screamed 'look at me!' at the top of your lungs to the entire universe. Are you surprised that the people she was hiding from were among those that turned their eyes in your direction?”

“You might be able to lie to the halfwits you surround yourself with—”

“People who live in glass houses, Sherlock.” 

“—but this grotesque charade is a new low, even for you—”

“Of course, you were ripe for the picking by then. You didn't think of that, did you? You didn't observe how Magnussen spent months setting you up, then played on your ego. And you fell for it like an amateur, like a beginner.”

Sherlock felt a stabbing cramp in his chest at the memory of standing in Magnussen's house, the man's flat smirk in front of him as Sherlock realised the magnitude of his mistake. “This has nothing to do—” 

“You just followed the impulses of your arrogance and bruised ego. I'd ask if you have any idea what you've done, but there wouldn't be any point, would there?”

“Do the rest of your harem know you sell out your agents? No, of course not; they might just turn around and take you down, like Caesar.”

“Agents. What are you—? Oh lord, Sherlock. Have you always—?” Mycroft sighed and for a fleeting instant Sherlock thought it might actually be real, before reminding himself who was at the other end of the line. “Mary Watson never worked for me. I know you won't believe me, but I have significantly higher standards than 'Ms Morstan' was capable of even at her best. Regardless, Sherlock—I dislike harping on the matter, but you couldn't have killed her more effectively than if you'd pulled the trigger yourself.”

“Did you do it before or after she saved my life?”

“She did not save—”

Sherlock hung up; he knew he was wasting his time. Mycroft would never admit what he'd done unless it was in his interest to do so. After stewing on the sofa for a minute, Sherlock rang back. “I'm never going to forgive you for this, Mycroft. And neither is John.” Then he hung up again.

He stared at the phone in his hand. Somehow it had become night-time without him even noticing, and with his phone off the only light in the room came from outside. Sitting in the dark made him feel like a child again for some reason, and he contemplated putting on a light. But the dark, sliced open by the shaft of light from the staircase landing, mirrored his mood perfectly so he left it alone. 

Sherlock wondered if he should check on John, asleep in his old bedroom upstairs. John the doctor had sedated John the grieving patient in order to ensure that he might sleep. On an intellectual level, Sherlock knew the man needed to rest, but he felt the urge to do something other than sit in the half-light, alone, angry and confused.

It was just under three hours since Lestrade had brought the news that turned their lives upside down. The look on the man's face as he'd waved goodbye had told Sherlock everything he'd needed to know about the probability of Mary's murderer being caught. 

Sherlock felt full to bursting, replete with something he couldn't identify. Was this grief? He'd never really grieved for anyone before. He couldn't help himself; he catalogued the various physical sensations, the anger and the countervailing lethargy, and the entirely unfamiliar feeling of helplessness. His intellect was of no use to him in this situation and that led to a rush of unease verging on vertigo. He glanced upwards, as if he could see through the ceiling and floor above to John, presumably asleep.

Now that he'd used up his one legitimate excuse for putting it off, he was going to have to tell everyone they knew. For a moment he toyed with the idea of forcing the odious task on Mycroft, but he didn't trust his brother not to twist the story to his own ends. He swiped his phone on and stared at the glowing screen. His thumb hovered over the icon that would bring up his contacts list. After a few seconds he let the screen go black again. He walked over to the window and watched the rain falling and cars sloshing up Baker Street.

Ever since he'd deduced what Mary had been—with the resultant realisation that she must have been working for Mycroft, at least at the beginning—Sherlock had ignored the personal implications of those two facts. At the time, he'd refused to countenance the sickening prospect of Mary's relationship with John being a fraud. As clever as she had been, there was no way she'd have been able to fool Sherlock for that long. No one who'd seen the two of them together would believe she'd been acting.

So where did that leave him? His assumption had always been that Mycroft had sent her to John. The timing of Mary's arrival in John's life was too perfect for it to have been anything else. But the initially false affection had become real. Knowing Mycroft, he had even planned for that, as well. For someone with no sentiments or attachments of his own, his brother had an uncanny ability to foresee potential sentiments and attachments in others.

And why had Mycroft bothered to interfere in John's life, beyond just giving in to his unquenchable desire to meddle in everyone's lives? Sherlock had long known of Mycroft's ambivalence about Sherlock's friendship with John. And he also knew that Mycroft blamed John for Sherlock's greatly diminished desire to work on cases for his brother. So had he sent Mary to John with the hope that an emotionally shattered John would take up with the next pathological personality who crossed his path, and thereby no longer have much time for Sherlock once he returned? It seemed entirely in character that Mycroft would use people's emotions against them, as leverage to facilitate Sherlock's return to the bosom of the SIS.

Mycroft had slipped the day of the wedding, perhaps overplaying his hand through overconfidence. “Just like old times,” indeed. That statement alone—once Sherlock had remembered it while in his hospital bed after Mary had shot him—had been the final piece of the puzzle he'd needed to reconstruct Mary's true past: Mycroft's motive.

In the end, what did any of it matter? Mycroft's accusations had been correct in one way, loath as Sherlock was to admit it. Mary's past _had_ caught up to her, but not in the form of some shadowy enemy. Instead it had come from the one direction she'd probably thought was safe: her back. From her employer. And Sherlock couldn't help wondering what that might mean for everyone else in his life.

~ + ~

After three decreasingly-painful conversations, Sherlock began to understand and appreciate the formality of Lestrade's approach to communicating the news of Mary's death. The words were like a uniform, a coded convention that allowed him to de-personalise the message, effectively holding off discomfiting commiserations from the recipients. The exception, of course, was Molly.

By the time Sherlock got around to calling her the next day, Lestrade had already told her, saving Sherlock from having to endure her annoying weeping stage and allowing them to move on to practicalities. She asked him fourteen questions, none of which he could answer. He referred her to John on anything to do with the funeral, Lestrade on anything to do with the investigation, and to her memories of Sherlock's past behaviour on anything to do with the likelihood of him engaging in a “grieving process”.

John himself had barely made an appearance since disappearing into his room the previous afternoon. In the middle of the night, Sherlock had been woken by shuffling footsteps in the kitchen. He'd lain in bed, staring at the ceiling as he tracked the sounds: tap, kettle, cupboard next to the sink with the squeaky hinge. Scuffing footsteps. Telly quiet in the background for an hour before John's footsteps back up the stairs. No weeping, only the ghostly soundscape of John's presence.

Despite the close confines of the flat, Sherlock saw him only once all day, as John sloped into the bathroom. He doubted his friend was purposely avoiding him, but the man seemed to have an uncanny knack for not running into Sherlock, regardless. What bothered Sherlock most, though, was his total silence.

Sherlock decided to respect it, despite the questions roiling under his skin, baying for release. When John was ready to talk, who else would he have to go to? So Sherlock banked down the fires of his curiosity and turned his thoughts to other matters.

He distracted himself with wrapping up their most recent case and emailing the client with the solution. Once he was done, Sherlock glanced around the flat, unsure what to tackle next. He checked the website; there were no sufficiently interesting supplicants clamouring for his attention. No emails. Not even a comment on John's blog that required a withering put-down in reply. And that was strange, he realised. Word had not yet got out about Mary's death. In a country where the Prime Minister's cat received press coverage, the death of the wife of a minor, second-hand celebrity would ordinarily draw at least a few media scavengers.

Sherlock glanced out the window down to the pavement. There was no press evident, only two young women in deerstalkers taking selfies in front of their door. The usual.

He did not want to think about Mary. Because there was nothing _to_ think about Mary anymore other than the circumstances of her death, and that just led his mind inexorably back to Mycroft. And Sherlock wanted few things less than to think about Mycroft at that moment.

Coming hard on the heels of remembering what had taken place in that very room two weeks ago—Mary permanently interrupting the elder Moriarty twin attempting to bore Sherlock to death—he felt cut off from his moorings. He tried to remember the last time he'd felt as paralyzed with doubt, as unsure what to do next, as he had for the last day. On his right he had John and his all-consuming grief, which made him suddenly unknowable. On his left he had Mycroft and his betrayal, and no clear course for retribution.

For the last two weeks the circumstances of his life and work had suddenly been up in the air again. Doctor Deborah’s murder seemed to have slammed a brake on the sequence of events that began at Christmas. No one from MI5 had contacted Sherlock about it, and the agency seemed all of a sudden to have no interest in him at all. It was as if the events since the broadcast hacking, now deemed irrelevant, had been brushed aside by the powers-that-be. And since the day of the shooting nothing had happened: no Blythe hovering ominously over Sherlock’s shoulder, no being bundled off on a replacement six-month suicide mission. 

Mary’s murder was the first thing that had happened that felt like fall-out. The first thing that confirmed that what had happened at Christmas and since had been real. No one had even expressed to Sherlock an interest in the elder Moriarty twin popping up like the world’s most malevolent jack-in-the-box. That fact alone proved his suspicions that everything that had happened to him in the last three months had just been a consequence of some SIS internal battle, with Sherlock caught in the crossfire. And the only way that made sense was if everyone other than Sherlock had known beforehand that it was going to happen. 

And then everything, at least on the surface, appeared to have gone back to “normal”. Being a pawn had been unfamiliar and he'd hated it, so he wasn't unhappy to see it end. But the suddenness of the shift left him with still-unanswered questions.

Three days after Deborah’s death, his brother had made his first appearance at Baker Street since bringing Sherlock home from the airfield. Mycroft had, for some reason known only to himself, demanded that Sherlock leave England. At the time it hadn’t made an iota of sense and Mycroft had refused to explain why he’d changed his mind after preventing Sherlock from going to India to see The Woman. Now, of course, the reason was obvious: Mycroft had wanted Sherlock out of the country while his minions/allies/whoever disposed of Mary, in an attempt to hide his own culpability from the only person who would be able to connect the dots.

And now—now Sherlock had to add to all this mess the inconvenient and apparently unavoidable _feelings_ thrown up by Mary’s murder. Much as Sherlock hated to admit it, Mycroft had been right about one thing all along. Caring wasn’t an advantage. But what did you do when you couldn’t help caring? Did his brother have an aphorism for that?

Sherlock spent most of that evening sorting through the emotional detritus he’d been accumulating since his aborted Kosovo mission. As usual, everything seemed to start with Mycroft, most particularly Sherlock’s anger at his brother for refusing to help him with the broadcast hacking investigation that had brought another Moriarty into their sphere, and for stymying Sherlock’s efforts to get information from Moran’s ex-wife. A minute or so of re-visiting those grievances segued into the wary anticipation that had hovered at the back of his mind since Mary had blown Big Jim’s brains out: that he would be bundled off onto another plane at Edwin Blythe’s whim. The previous two weeks had started with the shock of Deborah’s murder, then the headlong rush of excitement at realising his instincts had been right all along about the case. And then everything was mashed up into his shame at having to be rescued by Mary in the end.

That had stung. And now she was dead and Sherlock was left feeling like a fool for not knowing what to do with all the intractable emotions that resulted. For over a year, while his life had been uncomfortable in some ways, it at least had possessed a certain satisfactory logic. Now he didn't even have that.

Sherlock knew that everything was going to change again. He also knew that he and John wouldn't be going back to what they were before Mary, before the Fall. And not knowing what was coming next elicited none of the usually giddy anticipation; it just brought a kind of motion sickness, a hollow feeling of dread.

~ + ~

The knock at the door startled him; Sherlock glanced over his shoulder to see Molly in the doorway, twisting one end of her scarf in her hands.

“Hi,” she said as she glanced around the room.

“Stop hovering. It makes you look indecisive. There's nothing I hate more than indecisive people.”

“I thought it was stupid people and people who ask you to stop taking drugs you hate the most,” she countered as she entered the room. “Is John around?”

“Yes. Presumably. If you look carefully you'll notice the absence of a sign-out board.”

“Oh, okay.” There was a noise from upstairs and she glanced up to the ceiling. “How's he been? I mean, he must be gutted, but—I—um, is he okay? I mean, considering—”

“I've barely seen him in two days. I imagine he's—” Sherlock paused and turned away from her solemn face as he searched for a more adequate word and failed. “Okay. Ish.”

“Okay.”

It wasn't a question, but Sherlock knew she was questioning his assessment. “What?”

“Nothing, just—I mean, he can't really be okay. He's just lost everything.”

“No he hasn't; he still has me.”

Sherlock could tell by the shock, then the studiously blank expression that stuttered across her face that he might have crossed a line. Yes, equating himself with John's wife and child was a bit over the top, he recognised after a moment's reflection. He stood by his main point, though: John _wasn't_ alone. The more fastidious part of his mind reminded him that yes, John was alone because he'd spent the last two days hiding in his room, refusing to speak to anyone. But Sherlock rejected the possibility that John believed himself to be alone, because Sherlock didn't know how he would respond if that were true.

He returned Molly's silent stare across the sitting room for a few seconds before she broke cover. “Has he mentioned anything about the funeral?”

“I refer you to my previous statement about not having seen him for two days. Well, not literally _not seen_. I have, of course—”

“You didn't—never mind, of course you didn't,” she said, then turned and headed up the stairs.

Instead of returning to his work, Sherlock stood motionless in the middle of the room as he listened to Molly knock on John's bedroom door, then the door opening and quiet voices, and the door closing again. He looked forward to rubbing her nose in it a little, John's rejection and the universe letting her know that Sherlock's approach was best. But instead of the expected sound of her clomping, disappointed, back down the stairs, he heard two voices above his head, just barely audible over the Baker Street traffic.

Why hadn't he thought of that? Why hadn't he thought to just walk up the stairs and knock on the man's door?

Sherlock blinked down at the box of scalpels in his hand, then placed it on the desk. He glanced up to the ceiling and tried to deduce the ebb and flow of the conversation going on above him based solely on the pattern of footsteps. Irritated with himself, he _tsk_ -ed, picked up the scalpels again and returned to the kitchen and his tissue samples.

Just over an hour later, Sherlock was surprised by the sound of approaching feet. He glanced up to see John standing by the end of the table, watching him work. Molly examined the two of them from the sitting room. Under her scrutiny, Sherlock felt like a lab rat being studied by a scientist to see how it would respond to new, carefully-controlled stimuli.

“Are you all right?” he pointedly asked John.

“Yeah, okay. Considering,” John replied, obviously uncomfortable and sharing Sherlock's annoyance with being turned into a behavioural science experiment for the sake of Molly's peace of mind. To her credit, her resolution gave her the bottle to ignore the emotional currents swirling around the room, which would ordinarily have sent her off in tears. Irritated as he was, Sherlock was almost proud of her.

“I'll talk to you tomorrow,” she said to John, then departed with a vague wave in their general direction. Sherlock wondered if it was nerves that were affecting her behaviour, or if his bad manners were finally rubbing off on her.

With Molly gone and John finally in the same room as him and acknowledging his existence, Sherlock was annoyed to discover he was at a complete loss.

“Tea?” John asked, breaking the rising tension.

“All right.”

John didn't move, obviously expecting something more; then he headed for the kitchen. Sherlock forced himself to not watch; he hated being hovered over and didn't want to do that to his friend. He kept his head bent down to his microscope, but all his attention was focused on John.

When Lestrade had brought the news of the “accident”, Sherlock hadn't had the opportunity to say anything to John. Lestrade had done all the talking, then John had disappeared almost immediately into his room. And now, two days later, Sherlock was no closer to having formulated a response. He knew he had to say _something_ , but the words just wouldn't come. His instincts told him his ordinary approaches to John wouldn't be appropriate; it appeared that he needed a mode of communication that he'd never learnt before.

Sherlock glanced over to where the man was standing, watching the kettle work its way up to a boil. He didn't look particularly devastated. Tired, yes, with a hint of annoyance. No, boredom, Sherlock realised.

John was _bored_.

While Sherlock acknowledged that he was far from an expert on ordinary human emotions, even he knew that boredom wasn't the usual response to the loss of loved ones. He was almost giddy with relief, though. Boredom he could fix; all he needed was to find a case to distract John and give them something to fill the chasm of silence between them.

The only problem was that he didn't have a case. Other than the obvious one, of course. Sherlock wondered: would it be tacky to ask John to help solve his own wife's murder? Perhaps he should ask Lestrade about the form for such matters. Not that John was exactly conventional about this sort of thing; it was more likely he'd become a little too enthusiastic and start running around London waving his gun at people again.

Mary's death wasn't exactly a mystery, though; Sherlock was 98% sure that all roads would lead to Mycroft in this as in so many other things. But after three months of beating his head against the brick wall of MI5 over the broadcast hacking case, he had no interest in signing up for more frustrating dead ends, regardless the delicious temptation of forcing Mycroft to pay for what he had done.

So what could he conjure that might tempt John? There was nothing on the website. The two small cases they'd picked up the previous week were finished. He could dredge up one of Lestrade's cold cases and see what John might make of it, but they both hated academic exercises, so he ruled that out.

John thunked a mug of tea near Sherlock's right hand. “Thank you,” Sherlock said, examining the bags under John's eyes.

John looked at him askance. 

“What?” Sherlock demanded.

“You—no, nothing.” John almost chortled as he headed for the sitting room and his laptop.

Sherlock was relieved. John was no longer hiding; he was talking. He was tired and bored and a little tense for some reason, but he was at least attempting to return to normal. Like he always did, John was putting on a brave face.

Not that Sherlock had any idea what “normal” really meant anymore. He felt a bit unmoored. He knew he'd been drifting for months, ever since Lady Smallwood had come to him the previous summer. He also knew that had been a very bad thing for a lot of boring reasons around drug use and what Mycroft had always tediously referred to as Sherlock's “state of mind”.

He surreptitiously watched John check his email, a deepening frown on his face. Would he stay at Baker Street? Sherlock wasn't sure if he wanted him to. What would be best for John?

“Oh shit,” John muttered.

“What?”

“Someone's left a comment on the blog about the accident. There's a link to a press release from Sussex Constabulary.”

Sherlock picked up his phone and checked his Twitter feed. And there it was: the front of the social media wave that was going to swamp them unless Sherlock did something about it. He fired a text off to Lestrade to let him know to expect a return of the Baker Street circus, then he sent one to Mycroft with a link to the press release: _Fix this. The very least you can do. SH_

He paced to the head of the stairs and yelled for Mrs Hudson.

“What?” she said as she appeared from her flat a minute later.

“The press circus and idiots with too much time on their hands are on their way.” He turned to re-enter the flat, then shot back over his shoulder, “Warn your boyfriend!”

“What? Sherlock—” she called back up the staircase, but he ignored her. Best to let her get on fuming about her bins again on her own. One bout of that per year was his quota, Sherlock thought.

He watched John staring at his laptop screen. After a few seconds, the other man's eyebrows flew up. “Huh. That's—Mycroft, I guess.”

Sherlock joined him, reading over his shoulder. The press release and all attached comments were gone, as were all other links to stories confirming or discussing the news. It was _something_ , he supposed, but the damage was already done. Sherlock looked down to the street below and sure enough, there were four press and seven fangirls on the doorstep already. At least the doorbell was still hanging out the bathroom window, so it wouldn't be bothering anyone other than Mrs Turner's tenants next door.

“What do you want to do?”

“Huh?” John turned to him from Mycroft's obviously-fascinating handiwork. “What do you mean?”

“About that.” Sherlock gestured towards the window and John joined him. After a moment he shrugged, then returned to his computer.

“They'll bugger off soon enough.”

While John sat back down, Sherlock felt the room elide into the past, like a low-tech version of time travel. They could be acting out so many moments from their past, it almost hurt to recall.

Could the last three years just disappear like some anomalous time loop that had eventually brought them back to the main timeline of their lives? Could they pretend it was so? Could it possibly be that easy?

~ + ~

When Sherlock saw the identity of his caller, he seriously considered not picking up. But he knew better than anyone just how persistent the woman could be, and the longer he held her off the more annoying she would become.

“Yes,” he said in the most off-putting tones he could muster.

“Well, that's not an appropriate greeting for your mother,” she began. 

Sherlock knew that unless he summoned the courage to hang up on her immediately, he was in for a long session of pain. He also knew not to apologise, though; the shock might just kill her and lord only knew what their father would get up to, left to his own devices. 

“Was there anything in particular you wanted?” he asked as he lit his blowtorch. He knew she would hear it in the background, which he hoped would penetrate her cloud of obliviousness to let her know he was _busy_.

“It's about the funeral—”

“What funeral?” There was an obviously stunned silence from the other end of the line before Sherlock's brain re-engaged with the conversation. “What about it?”

“Well, that girl from the hospital who's obsessed with you is apparently in charge of things—”

“Yes.”

“And I thought, as Mary had no family, that we should inter them here, in the family plot.”

Sherlock knew where his mother was headed and he spent 1.74 seconds pondering what his reaction was going to be to the question that was coming.

“You're asking the wrong person,” he muttered as he made sweeping passes over the kitchen table with the blowtorch; he liked the smell of burnt propane and the _whooshing_ sound of the flame passing through the air; it was vaguely threatening in an entirely deniable manner.

“I thought I would ask you first. Well, you know I've never been happy about there being a stranger in the family plot—” 

“Who?”

“Whoever's in your grave, of course. Mike refused to tell me who we were really burying—” 

“It could be three bags of cement for all you know.”

“I doubt that very much. And the vicar's been giving us the cut ever since you returned. So I was thinking—”

“Never a good idea, Mummy.”

“Sherlock, don't be cruel; it doesn't suit you.” She paused to collect herself. “I would very much like to get that stranger out of there. And it's macabre, that headstone still there even though everyone knows you're alive. And little Grace was the closest we'll ever get to a grandchild—”

“Mummy,” Sherlock warned before she went off-roading in that direction again.

“Well, neither of you is getting any younger. And your brother said—”

“What did Mycroft say on the matter of grandchildren?” Sherlock's ears perked up. _“Old friend from Oxford,” indeed,_ he thought to himself.

“Nothing, nothing—”

“Was it about his new girlfriend?”

“Really, Sherlock. Stop being so—malign. He was most firm on the point that she is _not_ his girlfriend. And stop trying to distract me.”

“You brought it up.”

“Your father and I have discussed it; we want whoever is interred in your spot to go. We want Mary and Grace there instead, if John is amenable.”

“Where will I be buried, then?”

“I'm sure Mike will figure something out. Father and I will be long gone, so we won't care. How do you think John will feel about the idea?”

“Why don't you ask him yourself? I know you have his number.”

“You're his best friend; I think you should broach the subject.”

“Nope.”

“Stop being difficult.”

“I have no interest in getting involved. Talk to Molly Hooper and have her ask John if you're too much a coward to do it yourself.”

“Honestly, Sherlock—”

“Good-bye.”

He ended the call before she could descend into the rougher forms of attempted manipulation. Knowing his mother, Molly was at that moment in receipt of an unexpected and uncomfortable call from a stranger. He hoped her nascent backbone was up to the challenge. 

~ + ~

The next morning, Sherlock padded into the kitchen, hoping to scrounge up some breakfast. There was a half-full mug of tea on the counter; it was still slightly warm to the touch, so John had had his breakfast about 30 minutes before. 

An hour or so later Sherlock realised he hadn't heard or seen his roommate all morning. He glanced at the clock on his computer: 10.32. He wondered; John was never out and about early in the morning unless absolutely necessary. 

An unfortunate idea rose up from the jangling pile of mental ironmongery in Sherlock's mind, and he leapt to his feet. All three of John's hiding spots were empty. A five-minute tossing over of the upstairs bedroom confirmed it: the gun was gone.

Sherlock knew where John had taken it, of course. He ignored his brief spasm of concern; John was in more danger from Mycroft's security than his brother was from an unhinged John chasing him around London. Sherlock had often wondered just how tight the security was at Mycroft's club for social defectives; some of the staff were suspiciously young and burly for men nominally employed to convey drinks to superannuated Cabinet ministers.

He would have been annoyed at John for not waiting for him if there was even the slightest chance John would get anywhere near Mycroft. And he knew his brother wouldn't need a warning; Sherlock had already done so, in effect, during their brief exchange four days ago. Not that Mycroft would have needed it in the first place. 

Mycroft's people were unlikely to kill John, even if he were to exceed expectations and manage to make a reasonable attempt on Mycroft's life, but the last thing John needed was to spend a night raving at the cell walls in some grotty police station, or worse: in the bowels of the MI5 facility where Sherlock had spent Christmas week. But he knew it would be fruitless to try warning John off (not that he really wanted to anyway); there was no way the man would be called off once he was on the hunt.

As Sherlock whiled away the rest of the morning staining tissue samples, his mind periodically drifted off to John, wondering what he was up to. There'd been no contact from him, Lestrade, Mycroft, or Mycroft's perpetually bemused PA, so perhaps John's absence all day was for entirely mundane reasons. Perhaps there was a sale on at M&S. But Sherlock couldn't help worrying.

Then, in the middle of the afternoon, he looked up and saw the man himself fuming in the doorway.

“What have you been up to?” Sherlock asked.

“Shut up.” John strode into the flat, in his stiff-legged “pissed off at the world at large” march. “Turn around.”

“I know all your hiding places already.”

“Just—turn around.” When Sherlock didn't move, John's face became even more pinched. “Can someone just _pretend_ for one minute that I'm marginally competent—” 

“Fine, then.” Sherlock rolled over to face the back of the sofa. He heard rustling behind him, obviously in the file box next to the bookcase. “You file your gun under 'G'?”

John ignored him and stomped off to the kitchen. Sherlock heard the fridge door open, then close, followed by each of the cupboards in turn as John performed his “Why is there never anything to eat in this flat?” ritual. At least he spared Sherlock the usual redundant commentary.

Ordinarily, Sherlock found John's anger either annoying or amusing. Considering the circumstances, though, it was reassuring; almost anything was better than the disturbing lethargy and evasion over the previous few days.

Sherlock rolled over to face the room. “You felt the need to do _something_ ,” he called into the kitchen. 

“Stop deducing me,” John called back, before slouching back into the sitting room and dropping into his chair.

“Tell me what you were doing with your gun, then.”

John looked abashed. “Nothing, really.”

For a moment, Sherlock wanted to press him for a real answer, before realising that doing so would just push John back into his shell. “I'm assuming you knew not to go after Mycroft. God knows, Moriarty tried for years to get to him, and with all due respect, you're no Moriarty.”

John opened his mouth to reply, then was distracted by his phone pinging. He pulled it out to read the text. “Yeah, not so much Napoleon of Crime as Napoleon of the flu shot clinic.”

Sherlock chuckled. “They're begging you to come back already?”

“No, not yet. They just want to know if I can take an afternoon next week for the clinic.”

Sherlock shrugged. “There has to be something more interesting around than going back to the clinic if you don't have to.”

John leant back in his chair and folded his hands across his stomach, bemused expression on his face. “Okay, Mr Expert, what's the next step?” It was almost like they were discussing any normal case and Sherlock wondered if this was how ordinary people coped with loss: ignoring it and displacement activities. He needed to hack into John's psychiatrist's records again to see what she thought on the matter.

“Deny Mycroft something he wants. It annoys him and between you and me that's about the most you can hope for.”

“Is that what you do? Deny him something he wants?”

The conversation was moving in Sherlock's least favourite direction. “How are the funeral plans coming?”

“Talk to Molly.”

“Really? You don't care?”

“Not that much.”

“Did you speak to my mother?”

John gave him a pained look. “Yeah. That was—odd. Do you really not know who's in your grave?”

“I've always assumed that's where they disposed of the double.”

“But you don't care.”

“Why? It's nothing to do with me.”

John cast him a sceptical look, which shaded into discomfort. “So I'm assuming it won't bother you if Grace and Mary are in there?”

“Of course not. So you agreed? You do realise you're going to have to see my parents every time you go down there.”

“Yeah.”

“And you're really okay with that?”

John chortled. “Yeah, I am, or I wouldn't have said yes when your mum asked me.” He paused and gave Sherlock a searching look before he seemed to realise something. “I like your parents, Sherlock,” he added in his “You may be a genius, but you're really an idiot sometimes” voice, which Sherlock found strangely heartening.

“So. Now we have a location, do we have a date for this—event.”

“The word you're looking for is _funeral_. And no, not yet. We're waiting for Mycroft to deal with evicting the current occupant. The PA said she'd get back to me later today, then your mother has to rustle up the vicar, and—logistics. It's almost like being in the army again.”

“You spent the morning wandering around London with a gun in your pocket for no reason whatsoever, fantasising about killing my brother, and now you're asking him for favours?” Sherlock couldn't help but be impressed; it was an exhibition of almost Holmesian nerve.

“No, your mother asked for the favour. Though I doubt a lot of _asking_ happened. You think he's going to say no to her?”

They both burst out laughing in the same moment and Sherlock felt the heaviness on his shoulders lighten a little for the first time in five days.

~ + ~

For the next three days, Sherlock had the entirely novel experience of being extraneous, and constantly being pushed out of the way in his own flat. As the funeral approached and preparations moved into full gear, Molly effectively took over the sitting room and demanded that Sherlock restrict his experiments to the kitchen. He knew to keep to himself that the flurry of activity at Baker Street was much like what had happened while Mary was planning the wedding. The only thing missing was the seating chart and the napkin explosion.

Eventually Mycroft came through, the grave was vacated and all the preparations completed. A disturbingly familiar black car transported Sherlock, John and Molly down to Sussex the morning of the funeral. Over the course of the hour-long drive, barely a dozen words were spoken between them. Never before had Sherlock been more glad that Molly had finally learnt a bit of discretion.

When they arrived, practically the first words out of his mother's mouth were, “Mike's not coming. Some crisis or other.” 

John slumped his shoulders in obvious relief; it had never occurred to Sherlock that John would be worrying that Mycroft would show up. He would have saved John a lot of worry if he'd just spoken up. Mycroft's policy of never attending weddings or funerals was universal, not just limited to the ones he was responsible for.

Sherlock felt John bristling next to him; he turned to see what had caused it. Janine had decided to attend, he saw, but Sherlock wondered why this upset John. He'd always liked Janine.

“I cannot _believe_ her,” John muttered as he glared in Janine's direction. Then Sherlock noticed his ire seemed to be directed at a short, sandy-haired woman half-hiding behind the rhododendron that Janine was standing next to.

“The infamous Harry, at last,” Sherlock replied under his breath. While John fumed at his side, pinned in place by a steady stream of attendees expressing condolences, Sherlock continued to stare at the one great mystery left in John's life.

She looked remarkably like her brother: about one centimetre shorter, hair slightly darker (though at her age that was due to her hairdresser, not her genes), slighter, and even though Sherlock knew the age difference was only three years, looked more like a decade older. _Well, that's the booze for you_ , he mused as he watched her glance nervously in their direction.

With Molly occupied with the funeral director and the vicar, and John with the other mourners, Sherlock continued to watch Harry, curious to see if she was sober or would dare to pull a flask out of her clutch bag. Of course, Janine caught him and obviously thought he was staring at her. With a sigh, Sherlock realised he was going to have to talk to her. At least doing so would offer him a closer look at Harry, unless she took to her heels at his approach.

“Hey there, Sherl,” Janine opened as Sherlock approached.

“Janine. I'm surprised to see you here.”

“Why? She was my friend, too.” She looked past him to John. “He seems to be holding up pretty well.”

“John's always possessed an exemplary stiff upper lip.” Sherlock was about to refute her comment about Mary, but realised just in time that now was likely not the best time to be telling her that their friendship had been no more real than her romance with him.

She just hummed a little in reply. To Sherlock's relief she was at least smiling, bemused expectation on her face.

“How's the cottage I bought for you?”

“Pretty and cold, just like you.”

Sherlock joined in her laughter. “Did you get rid of the bees?”

“Not yet. Supposedly they make good watchdogs.”

“And you're their queen.”

She grinned up at him. “And don't they know it.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Sherlock saw Harry Watson hovering, obviously trying to eavesdrop. He wasn't yet sure what to make of her presence there; John didn't seem to be paying her any attention, so Sherlock decided to follow his lead and do the same. Janine noticed him watching, so turned to look at Harry.

“Who's that?”

“John's sister.”

“Ooooh, the infamous, imaginary Harry Watson. Mary told me all about her.” She peered at Harry intently for a moment. “You ever met her before?”

“No, John's been keeping her secreted away—”

“Locked up in the attic, like the first Mrs Rochester.”

They shared a conspiratorial giggle while Harry slunk off towards the church.

“Well, it was lovely to see you, Sherl.”

“You too, Janine.” Sherlock wasn't even lying, he realised.

She dragged him down and kissed his cheek, then headed off toward the church door and two other women that Sherlock vaguely recognised as Mary's other bridesmaids.

And from that moment, the day slid inexorably downhill.

It was awful, every second of it: Harry successfully dodging him for the entire day, while at the same time hovering in the background like a hungry ghost; the eulogy (lies, all of it) that Molly had insisted he deliver; and the bizarre wake at his parents' house. It was an exercise in slow torture and he hated Mycroft even more for having escaped this, as well.

Seeing Molly and Lestrade in the house where he'd grown up was the single most surreal moment in a life full of surreal moments. Once Molly had handed over responsibility for the day to his mother, she appeared to have regressed to puppy-eyed, blithering idiot as she wandered from room to room, and it was the most Sherlock could do to not cut her to the quick every time he laid eyes on her. Between having to see her peering at his parents' things and obviously wanting to talk about his childhood, and keeping an eye on John's alcohol intake, the afternoon felt like an emotional Long March. 

At least Mycroft's absence removed one of the possible flash-points from the affair. Harry Watson's presence was trying enough, but after having given up on the idea of talking to her, he told his mother who she was—with the result that Harry was effectively cornered for the rest of the afternoon—Sherlock was able to ignore her and focus on getting John through the day.

Once they were in the car for the drive back to London—sans Molly, who had decided to travel back with Lestrade—John finally let loose.

“I cannot fucking _believe_ her. She can't be bothered to show up for the wedding, but yeah, she'll come to the funeral. That fucking, passive-aggressive bitch—”

“John—” It was obvious that if Sherlock didn't say something, John was going to rant himself into some sort of apoplexy.

“—then she has the fucking nerve to ignore me the whole time, can't even be bothered to say 'hey John' or Christ, 'I'm fucking sorry your wife and kid are dead, John', but then she never even bothered to meet them when they were alive, did she? On, no, she just has to hover over it all like some fucking ghoul—”

“John!”

“What!” John shouted right back. Then he stopped, obviously embarrassed.

They stared at each other across the passenger compartment of the car.

“Sorry—” John mumbled.

“No, don't.”

John seemed to be as upset by his outburst as by what had caused it and Sherlock didn't know what to say. As had been the case for so much of the last eight days, Sherlock was at a loss. He'd spent more than two decades designing his life explicitly to avoid circumstances like this, but he knew he couldn't run from it, not if he wanted to keep John's friendship. This is what adults did, what _friends_ did. At least, according to films and television programs. Sherlock recognised he really had no one on which to model his behaviour in this sort of circumstance. Their father's typically fumbling efforts to teach them compassion when they were children had been rendered largely ineffectual by the example of their mother's waspish self-absorption. No wonder he and Mycroft had turned out the way they had.

“John, I'm sorry.”

“What about?”

“This. All of it. Mary and the baby.”

“Okay.” John paused to cast a wary, avoiding glance out the window. Then he seemed to come to a decision. “Okay, is everyone going to keep acting like pod people? Because it's freaking me out a bit.”

Sherlock let out a relieved exhale, part laughter, part surprise. “I've never done this before—”

“What? Attempt to be nice to someone?”

“Yes, that's _exactly_ what I meant.”

John chortled and the threatening tension broke. But the relief died quickly and John became suddenly quiet, as he stared out the window at the passing traffic. 

And Sherlock saw that John was sad. He wasn't sure if John had just been able to hide it for the past week, or he'd been able to deny what had happened until that day, the coffin and the grave giving it an undeniable reality.

Sherlock now saw that it was not just the death of Mary and the baby that saddened John, but the death of his dream of a particular kind of future and what it represented to him. He had always known that John's professed desire for wife and family, the house in the suburbs and boring normalcy was a self-delusion. The moment Sherlock had deduced what Mary had been he'd known why John had fallen in love with her, even if John hadn't been able to admit it to himself until that horrible evening at Leinster Gardens, when Sherlock and Mary had forced him to face the truth.

And now all of it was gone, and Sherlock wondered what John would use to fill the gaping hole in his life, and what he might conjure as replacement dreams for his future.

~ + ~


	2. Feel like getting into a little trouble?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a new case is brought to Baker Street, to general rejoicing.

Mrs Hudson knocked on the doorframe and chirruped, “A client to see you, boys. A lady,” she added in a stage whisper.

From his spot on the sofa Sherlock wondered, _Could it be?_ , before he dismissed the idea, replaced by, _Thank god_. They hadn't had a case since the funeral five days ago and they were both going out of their minds. And not even Mycroft was overbearing enough to send his goldfish to spy on them, not after their last conversation. 

Then, to his chagrin, Christina Martin appeared in the doorway and glanced around her, a familiar bemused expression on her face. Sherlock was glad John was there; he at least was able to summon some degree of manners and asked her to come in. 

“Lady Moran,” Sherlock drawled without moving from his very comfortable sprawl.

“Oh, are you—” John began before she interrupted him.

“Christina Martin,” she said emphatically as she held out her hand. Glaring at Sherlock for his poor manners, John took it and gave it a hesitant shake.

“Don't let me disturb you,” she said to Sherlock as she sat in his chair.

John glanced between them, apparently at a loss. Sherlock wondered if he had ever mentioned Mycroft's new “friend” to John; perhaps the different names was the source of his confusion.

“Um, can I offer you something, tea—?” John began.

“That's very kind, Doctor, but no thank you.” She turned her attention to Sherlock. “It appears I may not be staying long.”

“Feel free to leave any time.”

“Sherlock—” John replied in warning tones.

“I'm not here at your brother's request, let me assure you. Though I imagine my surveillance has already told him I'm here.”

Sherlock cocked an eyebrow while glancing at her out of the corner of his eye, and pointedly remained prone on the sofa.

“I'll come straight to it.” She glanced between him and John, and Sherlock thought she might be unsure of her reception. “I'm here to ask if you would be willing to take a case. I'd understand with your recent loss you might not—”

“What case?” Sherlock sat up and for a moment regretted letting her see him in his pyjamas and dressing gown in the middle of the afternoon. 

Christina briefly looked at John out of the corner of her eye, as if she was wondering if she should speak in front of him, before continuing. “Deborah Oppenheimer's murder.”

“Who's Deborah Oppenheimer?” John asked, once he saw that Sherlock knew who she'd meant.

Christina glanced between them again and Sherlock could see she was surprised that he hadn't told John about his former MI5 handler. He wondered if that was based on Mycroft's likely slanders to Sherlock's character, or a lack of understanding of who Deborah had really been to him, though he doubted the latter. Her expression as she waited for him to explain was expectation overlaying a subtle hint of amusement at Sherlock's obvious discomfort at having been caught out hiding something from his best friend.

John cleared his throat and gave Sherlock an equally expectant look.

“My MI5 handler.” After John nodded, Sherlock continued, to Christina. “Do I have to kill him now?”

A faint, slightly insidious smile appeared on her face, and Sherlock knew the answer she would give him. “You're asking the wrong person. I couldn't care less if Doctor Watson knows. Your brother, on the other hand—” 

The last thing Sherlock wanted to discuss with Christina Martin was Mycroft. “Why do you care who murdered Doctor Deborah?” _And what makes you think I'll help you and Mycroft by solving it?_

The question obviously caught her off-guard and it took her a moment to reply. “She was a friend for almost twenty years. Deborah doesn't deserve to be just another dead woman, dismissed as irrelevant.” Her tone clearly communicated that the police had no place in her plans for a response, and Sherlock spent a moment or two pondering just who might qualify as an “old friend” in Mycroft's personal lexicon.

Sherlock admired her approach, though; it was a master stroke to engage John's inherent protectiveness towards women. It meant he would argue to overcome Sherlock's reservations with working for Mycroft's pawn or spy or whatever she really was. He wondered if his brother had briefed her on how to present her argument. “Who do you suspect is responsible?”

She chortled and Sherlock frowned. “I applaud your business model. Charge people to solve their case, while expecting them to do the actual work.” The look she gave him bordered on conspiratorial, which made Sherlock instantly uncomfortable, and again he wondered if that her been her intention.

“I must advise you, my rates for mundane cases such as yours are prohibitive.” Out of the corner of his eye he saw John's startled look; Sherlock never took “mundane” cases, of course, but the former Lady Moran didn't need to know that.

“I'll be paying you out of my husband's account, so feel free to pad your expenses to your heart's content.”

“A _profligate_ client; my favourite kind.”

“So you're taking the case?”

Sherlock could tell she saw through his protests, but was discreet enough to not mention she'd likely always expected that he wouldn't be able to resist taking the case. He glanced to John's barely restrained excitement at the prospect of it and Sherlock knew he couldn't deny John this. Dismissing Christina would mean placing greater value on his own desire to thwart Mycroft than on his friend's need to get back into the game, and Sherlock couldn't do that, not now.

Christina cocked her head slightly, and gave him a quick, sad smile before turning to John. “I think I'll change my mind about that tea, Doctor.”

“Yeah, okay.” John glanced over to Sherlock before heading off to the kitchen.

After watching to ensure John was out of hearing range, Christina ambled over to the window, then turned to Sherlock and whispered, “How are you two holding up? I was going to come last week, then Mycroft told me about—” She craned her neck to see into the kitchen.

“Please don't concern yourself about it.”

Christina was obviously sceptical as she cocked an ear to John's puttering. “I waited as long as I could, but—” She turned back to Sherlock. “Things are starting to happen very quickly, and I wanted to ensure—well, that you're on the case while there are still tracks for you to follow.”

“What things are starting to happen fast?”

“Oh, I think I'll let you figure those out for yourself. I imagine you can deduce at least half of them without leaving this room; you have a lot of the data already.”

He stared at her; she stared back for a moment before crossing to the fireplace. As Sherlock watched her pick up and closely examine the skull, he wondered why she needed him if she was as ahead of the game as she wanted him to believe. “Why don't you get Mycroft to deal with this?”

She replaced the skull to its usual spot, then turned her bemused expression back to him. “He's got much bigger fish to fry right now.”

“Busy climbing back up, up, up, the ziggurat.”

To his surprise, she snorted, then choked back a laugh.

“I'm astonished you know that reference,” he said.

“I'd bet not as surprised as I am that you do.”

“It's astonishing the things you'll find amusing when ripped out of your mind.”

“Well, I bow to your superior understanding on that point.”

“What point?” John asked as he handed Christina a mug of tea. She wasn't quite able to suppress a faint grimace as she looked down at it.

“Sherlock's superior understanding of the side-affects of regular narcotics use,” she replied, deadpan, without a hint of discernible malice in her tone. Sherlock wondered how useful that level of skill at dissimulation might have been during her years of marriage to Moran.

John stilled just as he was about to sit. He looked over to Sherlock to gauge his reaction, then relaxed when he saw Sherlock was more amused by the statement than anything else.

“So, where are you going to start?” Christina asked after a brief sip of tea, followed by a startled expression.

“I haven't agreed to take this case of yours.”

“Come on. What else do we have going on?” John asked, obviously desperate to get out of the flat and on the hunt again.

“You will take it on, won't you?” The almost Mycroftian smugness with which this question was delivered almost compelled Sherlock to decline just to wipe the look off her face. But he didn't. And not just because John needed this. Because Sherlock agreed with her: Doctor Deborah deserved to not be pushed aside and forgotten; she deserved to have her murder solved. Whoever had done it should be brought to some sort of “justice”, even if said justice was nothing more than Mycroft insidiously removing them from the arcane hierarchy of backroom power players at Vauxhall Cross. And for Sherlock's own interest, he acknowledged; he wanted to know who had done it.

If nothing else, John's face as he'd watched Sherlock and Christina discuss the case would have decided the question, anyway. The man was more animated, more engaged than Sherlock had seen since the “accident”. Sherlock should, perhaps, have been a little concerned about his best friend's desire to throw himself into the path of Britain's security services, especially considering John's response to the second Moriarty case. Because Sherlock knew in his bones that was where this case would take them, and this was likely the real reason why Christina Martin had brought the case to them. Mycroft wouldn't touch it, wouldn't imperil his newly-regained status in the SIS for Deborah Oppenheimer or for Christina, “old friend” or not. 

“Oh, it might be a pleasant diversion for a day or two,” Sherlock finally replied to her question. “What do you think, John? Feel like getting into a little trouble?”

John smiled. “Always.”

“Excellent,” Christina said. “When will you start?”

“How about right now? You said I had some of the data already. Well, you're probably the best source of data available, so why not give it up.” Sherlock had to grudgingly give her some credit; she wasn't fazed at being backed into a corner. 

“Okay.” She sat, then shifted in the chair, carefully placed her mug on the nearby table, folded her hands in her lap, and gave him what appeared to be a well-practiced “do your best” look.

 _Excellent, indeed._ Sherlock steepled his hands under his chin and cast a penetrating look at Christina. “What do you know about Deborah Oppenheimer?”

“That's a little vague,” she replied, then turned to John with a smile that told Sherlock she was genuinely enjoying herself. “Should I wait for you to get your little notebook? Oh, and before we get going, I need to clarify one point: this case will _not_ be making an appearance on your blog, Doctor.”

John made a little chirrup of satisfaction as he retrieved a notebook from under a pile of paper on the desk.

Half an hour later, John had filled at least a dozen pages of notes, and Sherlock had heard almost nothing of value about Doctor Deborah that he hadn't already learnt from the victim herself.

Sherlock couldn't help questioning just how well Christina had known Deborah, based on her inability to tell him much of anything useful. This led to his questioning her stated motives for hiring him. He wondered if it would be helpful to confront her about that now, or let her believe that he accepted her reasoning. Because he didn't have any evidence she was actually lying, he decided to let it be.

He turned his attention back to her, and saw that she and John were finishing up a digression on _her_ past history: when she'd come to England, and how she'd come to know Mycroft. When she noticed him listening, she stopped, then smoothed her skirt and hitched on another of her slight, bemused smiles.

“I should be on my way. Thank you for agreeing to take this on, gentlemen.” She stood and walked over to Sherlock, still sitting on the sofa. She held out her hand. “It was lovely to see you again, Sherlock, despite the circumstances.” After giving her outstretched hand a dismissive cocked eyebrow, he slumped back on the sofa. She gave a short, amused-sounding huff, then turned to John. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Doctor Watson.”

“John, please. And yeah, a pleasure to meet you, too.” John pointedly stuck out his hand for her to shake, which she did with one sardonic pump of her hand. Sherlock couldn't help rolling his eyes.

Once they heard the front door slam shut, John turned to Sherlock.“Well, she seems—”

“Nice?” Sherlock asked, laying on the sarcasm.

“No, I was going to say strange. Yeah, she reminds me of Mycroft a bit, but with a sense of humour. Kind of. You don't have some long-lost sister or anything, do you?” 

Sherlock snorted as he imagined what Mycroft's response to that comment would be. Mortification would be only the start. “Honestly, John. My father's never been to Canada.”

“Still,” John continued, “She's a friend of Mycroft's, so she'd have to be weird, wouldn't she?” Sherlock shrugged, but that didn't deter John. “Why were you so rude to her when she got here?”

“She's always irritated me.”

“That's pretty rich, coming from the king of irritating.” Sherlock turned his head and gave John a sideways look. “Yeah, you don't like her on principal because she's a friend of Mycroft's. So how do you know her? Was there something going on about the Parliament bombing case? You could have told me you'd met Moran's ex-wife.”

Sherlock refrained from reminding John of his refusal to help Sherlock with anything at the time, even a forty-four year old cold case. “No, nothing related to that.” _Possibly,_ Sherlock added in his mind. “I met her during the broadcast hacking case. There was another video, and Doctor Deborah asked her to verify its authenticity.”

“Huh. She's an agent, then. I guess that's why she's still in contact with Mycroft. And what was that all about—mundane cases?”

“No, she works at the National Archives.”

“Old girlfriend?”

Sherlock knew that John was expecting him to join in the joke, but he demurred. “I'm not sure.” Sherlock decided to refrain from sharing his inchoate thoughts on Christina Martin until they had coalesced into something resembling coherent thought. “Regardless, while the former Lady Moran was hopeless as a source of information about her ex-husband's spying operations, I suspect she'll be more useful on what Mycroft is up to.”

“Weird coincidence, though. An old friend of Mycroft's showing up, and she used to be married to Sebastian Moran? And knew your handler?”

When Sherlock didn't answer, John settled back in his chair, obviously waiting for more details. Sherlock waited until John veered away from questions Sherlock had no answers for and back onto a relevant subject. “So you were working for MI5 all that time.”

“Obviously. I was supposed to be figuring out who was hiding behind Moriarty's face while attempting to cause widespread panic in the government.”

“Why?”

“Why me or why was someone attempting to cause widespread panic in the government?”

“Either.”

Sherlock shrugged again. “For a laugh? Who knows.” 

“And this Oppenheimer woman was murdered and that's connected somehow?”

“Possibly.” 

“And what about her daughter?” John pointed to the doorway via which Christina had departed.

Sherlock was surprised that John remembered the attack on the three girls; perhaps they'd discussed it while Sherlock wasn't paying them any attention. “No idea.”

“Okay.” John was obviously sceptical. “So why are you _really_ taking the case?”

“What do you mean?”

“It can't be just about this Oppenheimer woman. I mean, she was murdered a month ago. If you'd cared you'd been investigating it already.”

Sherlock didn't know if he was more offended for his own sake or Doctor Deborah's. But John hadn't known the woman, or anything about her work with Sherlock, so he let the dismissal slide. “What makes you think I have an ulterior motive?”

“You think Mycroft's behind this, don't you, regardless of what Christina Martin said? And if you're thinking that—which you are—” John interrupted Sherlock's attempted protest, “—then of course you have an ulterior motive.”

Sherlock knew he was going to have to lie to John again, but it was for the man's own good. And in the end, what did his motives matter? “I need to know what Mycroft's up to.” _And if I can bring certain of his cronies down along the way, even better._

“So you're going to use this case to try to spy on the man who controls this country's really extensive surveillance systems?” John sounded simultaneously incredulous and amused.

“No, I'm going to use this case to get the former Lady Moran to do it for me.”

~ + ~

That evening Sherlock decided he might as well dive right into his new case. In the afternoon, John had already taken care of the easier on-line research—the part that didn't require hacking into any systems.

For a professional of some decades' standing, Doctor Deborah had a remarkably thin on-line presence. There was no evidence of the usual professional activities: conference papers, publications, or involvement in professional associations. It was almost as if she'd sprung, fully-formed, out of the ground at Blythe's command, solely to shepherd Sherlock into every logical and investigative cul-de-sac possible during the broadcast hacking case.

Once John had passed on the meagre results of his efforts and gone to bed, Sherlock took over. Referring to his notes on what Lestrade had told him in February about Deborah, Sherlock plunged into hacking the University College London student records database.

He found little that he didn't know already; the only surprise (and it was a minor one) was that Deborah had left school at sixteen, then returned to sixth form college a year later. There were a number of perfectly boring explanations for that gap: a change in plans regarding her future, illness, her family temporarily needing another income. She had attended school in Golders Green (not surprising for a Jewish girl in London in the late 1960s), but she had attended a sixth form college in Clapham.

Mildly interested, Sherlock pursued that avenue, but it appeared the school had shut down in the mid-1990s and he could find no evidence of where the records might be. 

Some time in the middle of the night, he took a break and looked over John's scribbled notes. Sherlock could always tell how engaged John was on a case; the more interested he was, the messier his handwriting. Judging by the crabbed scrawl in front of him, Sherlock acknowledged that it was good to see John interested in something other than his grief. 

Best of all, there was nothing about the case that would remind John of Mary and the baby. Because everywhere Sherlock looked, there were reminders: a discarded soother found under the sofa that had caused a ten-minute weeping jag by Mrs Hudson just that morning. The places they went, people they saw, the clinic that John insisted he'd return to, all had associations. And John still hadn't mentioned what he was going to do about the house, which he'd only returned to once since the “accident”. 

While Sherlock was more than happy to have John stay at Baker Street, they couldn't just continue as if the previous three years hadn't happened. But Sherlock wouldn't—couldn't—talk to John about any of this, because the last thing he wanted was to upset the delicate balance of their current amity. Sherlock might have felt differently if John had given a hint that he wanted to talk about any of it. To Sherlock it felt as if they were all waiting with bated breath for John to do or say something that would indicate what he wanted, while everyone who cared about him stood on the sidelines and watched for a sign of what they should do to help.

One thing Sherlock knew instinctively was that they wouldn't go back to the way things were before, even if it currently seemed as though John were trying to turn back the clock to 2012, retreating to the former comforts of his life before Mary, before the fall and Sherlock's disappearing act.

Sherlock had never dealt with grief like this before, either his own or someone else's. He was glad that John didn't seem to need Sherlock to change to accommodate him or address the grief that filled their home, because Sherlock had no idea what to do. He didn't want to alienate his best friend by stumbling on to the worst thing to say, so he gladly allowed himself to be silenced by this overweening ignorance.

Mycroft, of course, would know the _form_ of what to say, without being burdened by the substance of feelings behind the words. But Sherlock vociferously rejected empty platitudes; he always had. So he knew he had to find his own way through the thicket of loss and uncertainty to find the words he needed, for both their sakes.

The next morning, Sherlock tracked Lestrade down to his office at Scotland Yard, even though he was 97% sure the conversation would garner him nothing more than frustration. When he arrived, Sherlock could barely find the man in the towers of file boxes that filled his office.

“Finally packing it in, Lestrade?”

The man stood up from where he'd been crouching on the floor, rifling through a box. “Ha ha. No. We're packing for the move to our new digs, and of course all the files I need are the ones someone decided could be packed early.” Lestrade dusted off his hands. “How you two doing?”

Sherlock shrugged. “Yes, it is difficult to get good help, isn't it?” he pointedly replied in Donovan's general direction as she stomped past.

“Well, what do you want? I'm busy.”

“Yes. Filing. Very productive use of a Detective Chief Inspector's time.”

“Sherlock—”

“I need information on a murder investigation.”

Lestrade straightened up, clutching the small of his back and stretching. Sherlock refrained from commenting on impending old age and physical deterioration until after the man gave him what he wanted.

“Which case?”

“Deborah Oppenheimer.”

“Don't know it.”

Sherlock knew he was lying, and that Lestrade had been expecting the request. He decided to gift the man with the delusion he'd managed to deceive Sherlock about it. “It's a Thames Valley case.”

“Go talk to Thames Valley, then.” A fake look of surprise appeared on Lestrade's face. “Wait, is this the woman who was shot when you were at her house?”

“Maybe.”

“Christ, Sherlock. That was an MI5 cock-up, wasn't it? Haven't you had enough of them since Christmas?”

Sherlock was surprised that Mycroft had told Lestrade this much. He'd already suspected that the forced separation from Sherlock for those three months had caused Mycroft to go searching for a replacement confidante, but confirmation was always pleasing. Lestrade seemed a strange choice, though. “It's a case, just like any other case.”

“Yeah, right. Anyway, it's not _our_ case, so I can't help you.”

“Come on, Lestrade. You could ease the path a little—”

“They've already kicked you out once, haven't they?”

“If by 'kicked me out' you mean released me after I gave a statement, then yes, they 'kicked me out' of their station. Now I need them to give me access to the rest of their files on the case, so if you wouldn't mind—”

“Nope. Not going to happen.”

“Why not?”

“Ask your brother.”

“How do you know he hasn't ordered me to conduct an investigation of my own?”

“Because he'd have given you the files himself if he did.”

“Mycroft has been locked out of MI5 since before Christmas—”

“Really? Still?”

Lestrade was demonstrating an uncharacteristic nuanced understanding of the political situation vîs-a-vîs Mycroft's fluctuating position within the SIS. So Sherlock knew that Lestrade was still acting as Mycroft's flunky, and the man was for some reason paying Lestrade off with information. 

Lestrade continued. “I'd ask why you're sticking your nose where it doesn't belong but, well, life's too short and I have actual important things to do with my time.”

“This is important.”

“Donovan!” Lestrade shouted past Sherlock.

“What?” she replied from the corridor.

“Do you have any idea where Martine put the Stoner files?”

“Under 'S' maybe?” she answered in a more harried-sounding voice than usual.

“Ha bloody ha. No trace of it.”

“No idea, then.”

Sherlock fumed while this interchange took place around him as if he wasn't there. Perhaps that was why it was happening, he reasoned. When they were done, Donovan left without giving Sherlock so much as a glance and Lestrade turned back to his hunt. Time to get the conversation back on track. “Well, are you going to help?”

Lestrade looked up from flipping through a box of files. “Not unless you help me find the file for the Stoner attempted murder case.”

“Oh, for—” Sherlock stalked over to the pile of boxes in the far corner of the office, and proceeded to pull the stack apart until he reached the box at the bottom, labelled _CC s.147.ii_. He tossed it onto the desk, and rifled through it until he found the Stoner file. He smacked it onto the desk loud enough to make Lestrade jump. “There you go.” At the man's startled glance, he sighed and explained. “Whoever this Martine is, she's so delusional as to expect a Detective Chief Inspector to be familiar enough with this country's Criminal Code to recognise a reference to the section that addresses attempted murder.” Sherlock pointed at the label on the front of the box. “For future reference, they're filed by Criminal Code section, then name.” 

Sherlock headed for the door, then paused in the doorway. “The Constables I dealt with in Oxford were named Amy and Gerry. She's early 30s, reasonably new to the force, and a former schoolteacher. He's late 30s and a total no-hoper with a chip on his shoulder the size of Gibraltar. You shouldn't have too much difficulty hunting them down and ordering them to give me a look at their files.” He glanced to the file box on the desk. “Perhaps.” He turned and strode out the door, giving Donovan an aggressively friendly wave as he passed.

~ + ~

To his chagrin, Sherlock watched John plough through his breakfast, pretending to be oblivious to Sherlock's impatience to get a move on.

“It's your last day of freedom; why are you dawdling?”

“Because it's my last day of freedom. As of tomorrow it's shoving cold toast down as I run out the door at 7:30. Let a man enjoy his eggs.”

Sherlock flopped onto the sofa with a huff.

An hour later they were making their way through the crowds streaming through Paddington. As they settled into their seats on the train, John finally asked the question Sherlock had been expecting since Christina Martin's visit.

“So who is this Deborah Oppenheimer person? Other than your—” John glanced around them at the filling carriage.

“You think we should be discussing this in public? You could have asked me that while we were still at home.”

John shot him an amused look. “We could talk in code.”

“But I'd have to teach you the code first, and Oxford's only an hour from London.”

“Very funny.” John was not at all amused.

Sherlock decided to humour him a little. “The late Doctor Oppenheimer was a psychiatrist with whom I had scheduled appointments on Friday afternoons.”

“They sent you to a shrink?” John chortled. “Great cover, that. Like anyone would believe you'd ever agree to therapy except at gunpoint.”

“Not even then, let me assure you. At the time I assumed that twist was due to what Mycroft erroneously likes to think of as his sense of humour. It was, of course, surgically removed when he entered the civil service, as per government policy. But I've since changed my mind on that point; I don't think it was Mycroft's idea to send me to her, but that of one of his colleagues, who for some reason saw fit to waste large quantities of my time.”

“And you decided to never mention this to anyone.”

“I wasn't in a position to at the time. And that's a bit unfair. If I remember correctly—and I do—you were most adamant about not wanting to know anything about what I was working on at the time.”

“Yeah, okay. Fair enough. So. She was murdered.”

“Yes. We'd rather be wasting our time today if she hadn't been.”

John ignored Sherlock's snark. “And you never thought to investigate it yourself?”

Sherlock shrugged. “It wasn't my problem. Considering the professional company she kept, it's surprising she made it to the advanced age she did.”

“What made you change your mind?”

“I thought I'd already explained.” Sherlock gave a mock huff of annoyance. “I suppose that tells me how much attention you pay.”

“Yeah, right. So that you can get your client to spy on your brother for you. Why?”

“Why not? It'll do him a world of good to be on the receiving end for once.” Sherlock silently blessed John's somehow still-trusting nature, as the man accepted the lie for the second time in three days. All Sherlock could do was hope it was enough to keep John from going exploring in the minefield of Sherlock's past with the SIS, without him along as a guide.

Sherlock basked in the ameliorative banality of their conversation for the rest of the journey to Oxford. The only niggle of worry was raised by John's persistent refusal to discuss his immediate plans, while Sherlock just as implacably refused to discuss the Moran case and the former Lady Moran's possible ulterior motives for hiring Sherlock, in the latter case largely because he didn't want John to know he hadn't deduced them yet. 

When the cab dropped them off in front of the police station, Sherlock paused to wonder if Lestrade had complied with his request. If not, their visit was going to be a short one.

“Did you call ahead?” John asked in a rare moment of prescience when the desk sergeant left to track down Constable Amy.

“Why would I do that? Never telegraph your intentions, John. First rule of dealing with the authorities.”

John chortled. “You think your phone's still bugged?”

“Mycroft's always had my phone bugged. And yes, MI5 probably still listen in, as well.”

Sherlock caught the returning desk sergeant's startled expression at the mention of MI5.

Five minutes later, a harried-looking Constable Gerry appeared. Sherlock was as unimpressed as the policeman appeared to be.

“Constable Gallagher isn't available,” Constable Gerry opened before Sherlock got a word in. He didn't bother introducing the man to John; it appeared as though they wouldn't be staying.

“Mr Holmes?”

Sherlock turned to see Constable Amy in the doorway, escorting a young woman who looked as though she'd been dredged from the river, then dragged through a hedgerow or two.

“Constable Amy, lovely to see you,” Sherlock began in his best false bonhomie, which he was glad to see made no impression on her at all. 

“Gerry, can you take Cherice here and get her a blanket and a cuppa. She's had a hell of a day and she's got an assault complaint to file when her teeth stop chattering.” She handed the girl over to her frowning partner, then turned to Sherlock. “You're going to want to talk somewhere private, aren't you?”

“I always knew you were a step above the average plod, Amy,” Sherlock replied as he steered the woman back out the door, knowing John would follow.

As they strode down the street in search of coffee, Sherlock introduced John to the policewoman. They eventually settled in a shop two blocks from the station. It wasn't the closest coffee shop, Sherlock noted with satisfaction; Amy knew her colleagues would frequent the one in the nearest block, so it was unlikely they'd be disturbed while they talked. He was reminded of her admirable pragmatism and forethought the evening of Doctor Deborah's murder.

“So, I'm guessing you're here to ask about the shooting,” she stated once they'd settled.

“You were there?” John asked.

She gave Sherlock a short, questioning look; she'd obviously assumed that Sherlock had already shared the details of that day. “My partner and I were first on the scene. Even before the secret squirrel brigade showed up.”

John glanced between the two of them. “Because she—”

“Yes, because she was something we don't discuss in cafes.” Sherlock turned to Constable Amy. “I'm assuming the vermin took your files?” 

“Every bit of it. They probably even got the neighbour's 999 call removed from the system.”

“Oh, without a doubt. What do you remember?”

“Other than finding you bleeding out on the floor?” Out of the corner of his eye Sherlock registered John's startled glance between them, but thankfully he held his tongue. Amy turned to John. “You should have seen the hissy fit when the nurse had to shave his hair to give him stitches.” John snorted as Amy continued. “Other than that, I don't really remember much.” She glanced at Sherlock's still-patchy hair. “That's coming along nicely. Though I still think you should have taken up her offer to shave it all off for you.”

“That I'd have paid to see,” John interjected.

“Yes, thank you Constable Gallagher for that entirely redundant digression.”

“Do you still have your copy of your statement?” Amy asked.

“Of course.”

She shrugged. “That's probably the only evidence still in existence that the shooting even took place.”

“Well, that and the fact that the good Doctor is no longer with us.”

“Yeah, DI Crane was assigned to the case, but she never even got to talk to the victim's partner before it got shut down. She might not have even seen the file.”

Sherlock noticed that John picked up on the reference to Deborah's partner, the Exceptionally Well-Connected Maris. Sherlock wondered whether she had been using those connections to suppress the investigation into her wife's death, or if she might be willing to subvert MI5's efforts to bury it, depending on her possible connections to the culprit. There was only one way to find out, he supposed. “So as far as you know, no one has talked to the victim's wife?”

“I didn't even know they were married,” Amy replied with an “I told you so” expression.

“Somebody's pulling strings behind the scenes,” John added, entirely unnecessarily, in Sherlock's opinion. He wondered if John had become more stupid since Mary's death, or was just regressing into his former state of leaving all the thinking to Sherlock. He didn't know what to make of it other than that it was very much Not Good.

“A person affiliated with a certain organisation was murdered in her home in the course of an active operation; of course they're going to do everything they can to prevent outsiders intervening. One of their primary functions is ensuring no one is able to hold them accountable for their actions.”

Sherlock could tell from Constable Amy's briefly raised eyebrows that she'd caught his inference, even if John hadn't. 

“You're going to track down the wife?” she asked.

“Of course we are.”

John glanced at his watch. “Now? It's the middle of the day; she's not going to be home.”

“She's a senior faculty member of an Oxford college; what makes you think she does anything as gauche as teach or spend time at her office? Not that it's likely she'll speak to us, but we must at least try.” Sherlock stood and began bundling up. “Constable Amy, thank you for your assistance.” He held out a hand. “A pleasure, as always.”

She shook it with a wry grimace. “I wish I was more help.”

“As do I.” Sherlock flicked a quick, thin smile on his face, which she returned with a sarcastic air that made Sherlock like her even a little bit more. He made a mental note to mention her to Lestrade as someone to keep an eye on. She was going to make an excellent successor for him one day.

~ + ~

“Sherlock, what are we doing here?”

“Proving a point,” Sherlock replied as he jimmied the lock on the front door of the house.

After leaving Constable Amy at the coffee shop, Sherlock and John had taken a cab to the North Oxford home of the late Doctor Oppenheimer. And to their chagrin, if not their surprise, the late Doctor Oppenheimer's widow had refused to even answer the doorbell, even though the presence of her Range Rover in the driveway indicated she was most likely at home. So Sherlock had moved on to the next item on their itinerary: a visit to the house in the next road whose back garden abutted that of the late Doctor's house.

“What point?” John demanded as they strolled into what they now saw was an empty house.

“Well, perhaps _point_ is a bit of a stretch,” Sherlock replied as he attempted to disarm the security system. “Supposition, perhaps. Aha,” he said as his third attempt was a success.

“How did you—oh, never mind.” John followed Sherlock up the main staircase to the first floor.

Sherlock opened the door of each room facing the back garden until he found what he was looking for. He scurried over to the window, pulling out his magnifying glass. He felt John's eyes on him as he bent over to examine the faint and distinctive indentations on the interior windowsill. 

“See, John, look here.” He pointed. “Where they rested the back legs of the tripod.” As John bent over to see, Sherlock sighted out the window through the chestnut trees at the end of Doctor Deborah's back garden, to the rear of her house. He pointed to it. “In your professional opinion, Captain Watson, what would be the chances of a competent sniper missing a kill shot from here to that house?”

John glanced up to Sherlock's face, then followed his look across the two gardens. Sherlock watched the slow transformation in his friend's face from bemused spectator to engaged participant as he gave the matter some thought. 

After a few seconds, John replied, “Ten percent. More if it was windy. Those trees there.” He pointed. “Less if they were really good.”

“If I'm correct about who hired the killer, I would surmise that 'really good' could be considered an understatement.”

Sherlock bent over and began to survey the floor of the empty bedroom, turning his head this way and that to catch different angles of light off the floor. He took two paces towards the far corner. “Here. Significant disruption in the dust patterns.” He turned to sweep his eyes over the rest of the room. “Stay where you are.” He traced the sniper's movements within the room. “They were here for some time. Four hours, at least.”

“Waiting for their shot. Yeah, that happens. Days, sometimes.” The two men locked eyes. “She was at home that night, Sherlock.”

“I said nothing—”

“But you were thinking it.”

“Of course I was. How many current or former professional assassins do you think I know?”

“How should I know? Six?”

“That's not a bad guess.” Sherlock turned back to the window. “Four, actually, including Mary.”

“You just made that up to try to sound smart.”

“I never have to 'try to sound smart'. You're spending too much time with Mycroft.”

“Well, you can take that back or I'm leaving you here and going home.”

They shared a chuckle. “I never would have suspected Mary, anyway. She was too clever to take a contract on someone I knew.”

Sherlock could tell that that didn't really address the point of John's annoyance with him, but he decided to drop it. The man watched Sherlock resume his examination of the room, the door frame and the closet. To Sherlock's delight there was almost nothing to find, further evidence that MI5 or the CIA or Mycroft, or whoever, had hired a more than competent professional. Or that they'd been briefed to be especially vigilant in their clean-up, knowing that Sherlock might inspect the site at some point.

As they were leaving the house, Sherlock stopped to check the control panel of the alarm system. The last time the alarm had been shut off had been 9.42 a.m. on the day of the shooting. So the sniper had been there seven and a half hours. Sherlock made a mental note to revise his algorithm on dust accumulation to distinguish between empty and occupied buildings, in order to account for his new data.

As they headed off to find a cab back to the station, John asked, “Did you prove your point?”

“Yep.”

“How does that help solve the case?”

“I hate Oxford cab drivers,” Sherlock muttered as the second cab in less than a minute passed them by. “And in answer to your question, not much. It's more a matter of eliminating outlier possibilities. But I know one thing.” He turned to John. “I'm going to have to find a way to get the widow talking. And _that_ will require outside intervention.”

~ + ~

The next day, John returned to work at the clinic. In a way, Sherlock was glad to see him off in the morning; he had a lot of thinking to do about the case, and for some reason he didn't seem to be able to shut out the distraction of John's presence, as he'd always done in the past. And John had obviously been going stir-crazy in the flat left solely to his own thoughts, which had filled the space with a toxic fug that gave Sherlock a persistent headache.

But within half an hour of John's departure, Sherlock was pacing, agitated. He couldn't settle, couldn't focus, couldn't think past all the irrelevant thoughts crowding into his brain space. He knew it couldn't be grief. The funeral had been days ago; it was past time to move on. Why couldn't his brain recognise that fact?

In the end, Sherlock had to give up on the idea of analysis and he turned to simple recall; he decided to pick through all his conversations with Doctor Deborah in an effort to force his mind to calm down and focus on one relevant thing at a time.

When he came to the evening when Maris had called Deborah into the house for a telephone call (and who still had land lines these days, he wondered), he turned his attention to that brief glimpse of Deborah's wife. Despite Sherlock's best efforts, though, there was very little to deduce other than that she was clearly a daughter of the officer class, privately educated, and possessed a dress sense that not even the Queen could find objectionable. 

Sherlock flopped down onto the sofa. Just what he needed in his life, he mused: another uncooperative female. After disposing of the former Lady Moran (now recast as client in this little drama), the irony wasn't lost on him. 

So he conducted an inventory of the information he had available; the result was underwhelming and the feeling much too familiar. His and John's examination of the sniper's hideout had at least confirmed that Deborah, rather than Sherlock, had been the intended target. This complicated matters in one way, whilst simplifying them in others. The main question was why anyone would pay to have her murdered. The obstruction by the person who knew the victim best caused Sherlock to wonder for a moment if she might have been involved, but hiring an assassin seemed a very showy and expensive way to dispose of an unwanted spouse. Perhaps he should ask Christina Martin for any tittle-tattle regarding the Featherstonhaugh-Oppenheimer marriage that might be relevant. 

But until then, Sherlock would have to cast his net wider in the search for a motive. He knew almost nothing about her. Who was Deborah Oppenheimer? Until he could answer that question, Sherlock had no hope of learning who might have wanted her dead.

The on-line research (and hacking) that he and John had completed had revealed more lacunae than actual information. For the years during which she'd been an MI5 operative, Deborah would presumably have used her professional practice as cover. In contrast, over the last 20 years—years in which most people would have accumulated some sort of on-line presence—she seemed to have disappeared. Perhaps her wife's inherited wealth meant she didn't have to look for clients beyond the few sent her way by her former employers. Perhaps they had insisted she take no others. But the complete silence in public was still very odd. Why had she wanted to hide? Did she suspect that her past with MI5 made her a target? And if so, for whom?

Then Sherlock remembered Deborah's story of her little flirtation with the CIA. While he recognised that this likely had caused the rift between her and MI5, it had been 20 years ago. Not even Mycroft was capable of holding a grudge that long. And if someone had wanted her dead as a result of her straying, then she'd have been dust in the ground two decades ago.

And what about Deborah's never-properly explained relationship with Blythe? While it had been obvious that she'd been working for the man, what was the wider context of that relationship? Blythe certainly had the wherewithal to hire an assassin, but what motive would he have had to do so? The man was another one of the great mysteries that Sherlock was nowhere close to solving in the nest of mysteries that seemed to grow the longer Sherlock spent trying to pick it apart.

Next on his list was Christina Martin. The fact that she had popped up in his life again implied that whatever had really been going on behind the scenes in those months still had not been resolved, regardless of Mary's having dispatched the elder Moriarty brother. Sherlock wondered again what exactly was the nature of Christina's relationship with Mycroft, professional or otherwise. While it was entirely believable that his brother's skills at manipulation and obfuscation had led the woman to believe she was acting on her own behalf, it was also possible that Mycroft was openly behind her visit to Baker Street. And to his frustration, Sherlock still couldn't deduce what the significance of that might be, regardless of the deliciously intriguing speculation that came to mind as a result. He didn't have the data to support any of those suppositions. _This_ was getting out of hand.

Sherlock forced himself back to the main path of his thoughts; he needed to stop allowing himself to be distracted.

Of the many unknowns regarding the case, the logical entry point for analysis was the timing of the murder. It was inconceivable that it had been random; very few things in the universe were, despite the beliefs of the masses. Sherlock couldn't accept that there wouldn't have been other opportunities to bump Deborah off before that evening, if someone had had a mind to. The only possible explanation was that either the killer had just been hired, or they had been ordered to pull the trigger when Sherlock was with her. Both options raised intriguing questions associated with motive and suspects and the yawning pit of missing information that lay between him and the solution.

Like many of the complex cases Sherlock had solved in his career, this one possessed a comforting circularity. It was composed of a multi-dimensional matrix of linkages; he could almost see the lines of connections glowing like fibre-optic cable in his mind's eye, connecting the various parties. But he couldn't yet discern the exact nature of those connections, and he wouldn't be able to until he discovered what had created them.

At the very edge of his consciousness, Sherlock was aware of a tapping, buzzing sound, like a fly bumping up against a window. After ten seconds or so the sound began to resolve.

“Sherlock. Sherlock? You in there?”

The familiar sensation, akin to slowly rising to the surface from deep under water, chased away Sherlock's cogitating state. He blinked twice, slowly, his eyelids still heavy. John was looking down at him. Sherlock's other senses slowly came back on-line. He was stretched out on the sofa in his pyjamas and dressing gown. The low grey light of late afternoon filled the sitting room. The distinctive scents of turmeric and chilies identified the contents of the bags in John's hands.

“You were in there pretty deep,” John said as he ambled over to the kitchen and placed the bags on the counter.

“Sorting out the new data on the Oppenheimer case.”

“What new data?” Sherlock could tell that John was upset at the idea Sherlock might have spent the day chasing down clues without him. “I thought that was the problem. The widow—”

“Oh, that's data, John. Data about what might have been going on behind the scenes for the months leading up to the murder. Further back, even.”

“So you think it was because of her work with MI5?”

“Most likely.”

“So you _are_ going to have to talk to Mycroft, then.”

“No, I do not.” Sherlock huffed and retied the sash of his dressing gown. “My brother isn't the only option available. I suspect the fact that we've been allowed to continue on this case even though the powers that be know of it means someone in the shadows wants us to solve it.”

“Okay, that's good then.” John placed a plate on the table in front of Sherlock. He ignored it. John scowled at him, then looked pointedly at the plate. Sherlock continued to ignore it.

“Who do you think it is? Mycroft?” John dropped into his chair with a faint moan of relief.

“Possibly. He did send his newest minion.” Thinking of Christina's role in the case pinged another mental thread; Sherlock wondered if his original interpretation of why Doctor Deborah had taken him to meet Christina had been correct. Had that meeting been related to the reason why Deborah had been killed? If so, Sherlock needed to give some more thought to the former Lady Moran and her ex-husband, and what roles they might have played in the behind the scenes manoeuvring that had been going on during the broadcast hacking case.

“You think she was lying when she said Mycroft hadn't sent her?”

“She never said Mycroft hadn't sent her. She said he didn't know she was here; that's hardly the same thing.”

John cast a rueful grimace down towards his plate. The man focused on his food while Sherlock watched him, thinking about Christina Martin and her ex-husband and whether or not Doctor Deborah had been lying when she said the Morans had had no contact after their separation.

“Who else could it be?” John eventually asked once he'd finished eating.

“In what regards?”

“The powers that be who supposedly want you to solve this case. Why wouldn't they just let the police solve it instead of taking the files from Thames Valley?”

“Because some of the powers that be _don't_ want me to solve it, obviously.”

“Whoever hired the killer, yeah. So this is all just some sort of proxy war for MI5 people. They can't kill each other, so they kill each other's agents instead.”

Sherlock was mildly surprised John had got there so quickly on his own; he was learning. “Yes, proxy war about sums it up, I think.”

“So was this Doctor Deborah working for Mycroft, too? Or whoever he's fighting?”

“His enemies?”

“You know who that is, I'm guessing.”

“One of them, yes.”

“So, Mycroft's side killed her?”

“Not necessarily. There are most likely more than two sides involved. And there's nothing to prevent a general sacrificing one of his troops for the greater good of their cause.” The moment the words popped out his mouth, Sherlock flinched internally, knowing how John would grab that statement and run with it.

“Like Mycroft and Mary.”

And there it was: the subject Sherlock had been desperate to avoid for almost two weeks. “Did she ever confide that she'd been working for him?”

“No. But she must have at some point. There's no way she just appeared out of nowhere and he found out who she was and just decided to let her stay.”

Sherlock wasn't so sure about that, though all other alternatives were less likely. “With Mycroft anything's possible. But I agree, who she was and her meeting you—”

“No such thing as coincidences. Right.” John levered himself out of the chair and as he passed on his way to the kitchen pointed at the plate in front of Sherlock and ordered, “Eat.”

“Yes, mother.” 

Sherlock managed only two bites before his stomach rebelled. While John watched, Sherlock forced a third bite down, then gave him a sarcastic smile and flopped back onto the sofa.

“She loved you. Regardless of how she came into your life,” Sherlock said once John had returned to his chair.

“I know. I was—I was willing to overlook all of it. Everything in her past.” John paused; Sherlock knew they were getting close to John's real feelings, which the man was rarely comfortable discussing. “For that, yeah. I never really doubted that. Even those months we weren't talking.”

“I knew it the first night I met her.”

John looked over and Sherlock saw a glimmer of a smile. “Of course you did.”

They each kept to their own thoughts for a few minutes, then John broke the silence. “If she wasn't working for Mycroft, then who was she working for? At the beginning, I mean.”

Sherlock knew this was extremely dangerous territory for John to be exploring. None of the possibilities would be palatable to him, and Sherlock didn't want to lie. Mary's ability to see through his lies had forced him to make truthfulness more of a habit over the last year, and he wasn't sure he wanted to go back to lying to John. At least not about personal things. “Can you think of one possibility that wouldn't be worse than Mycroft?”

That statement startled John. He gave the matter some thought, though. “Probably not. Do you think she was working for Magnussen?”

“I don't know. It's possible, I suppose.” And it was well within the man's capabilities to send Mary after a lonely, vulnerable John in the expectation that the two of them might become attached, thereby giving Magnussen an indirect lever to Mycroft through John and Sherlock. That plan, of course, would have depended on Magnussen knowing Sherlock was alive when he was off tearing down Moriarty's European network. And wasn't _that_ an interesting notion. “Does it matter who she was working for at the beginning? Because in the end, she was working for the two of you. She never lied to you about that.”

“I know. It doesn't matter. She ran from her past and it caught up to her, eventually.”

“Mycroft caused her past to catch up with her.” _Regardless of his lies._

“I still don't understand why.”

“Do you really care? Does it make any difference?”

“Yeah, kind of. I mean, whatever, he knew about her past long before you came back, and he didn't do anything about it then. What changed his mind?”

“Is there any reason on Earth you'd consider sufficient to excuse his behaviour?”

“Nope. But yeah, I'd still like to know why. I mean, who's next? Me?”

“Never fear. Firstly, he knows I'd find a way to kill him if he did. And secondly, he'd have got rid of you that first night if he thought you might become a threat.” Sherlock pondered the possibility that had been lurking at the back of his mind since his last conversation with his brother. But there was no way John would understand, so there was no point voicing those speculations to him. Sherlock wasn't sure their friendship would stand the strain if Sherlock were right. “Magnussen,” he muttered.

“What?”

“Magnussen was right. As long as Mary was in your life, he could control Mycroft through us.”

“But Magnussen's dead.”

“And someone else will step into his shoes. Probably soon.”

“So who'll that be, then? The _Bismarck_ of Blackmail?”

Sherlock couldn't help a choked-off laugh, but John didn't join in.

“So Mary had to die as some sort of proactive defence against another Magnussen going after Mycroft?”

“It seems a reasonable assumption based on the available data. There is always the possibility, though, that there was something else going on behind the scenes that we don't know.” Sherlock shrugged. “Mycroft and his chums are always playing stupid games with other people's lives.”

“He sold her out to the CIA and they killed her. Why would they want to kill her?”

“She knew too much. And by running in the first place, she proved she couldn't be trusted with what she knew of their operations. She turned her back on them. Intelligence agencies aren't fond of turncoats.”

“But why—” John was suddenly upset and he paused for a moment to collect himself. “Why Grace? What could they possibly gain from that?”

“I doubt they'd intended to.” Sherlock paused as a realisation popped into his mind. “Perhaps they'd been waiting for an opportunity to get Mary alone, but there wasn't one. Perhaps they had a deadline that was getting too close for comfort. Perhaps they didn't adequately brief the agent responsible. And Mary never seemed to be without her that last week or two—” Sherlock paused when he saw a light go off in John's head's and he immediately regretted putting it there. 

“You think she knew they were after her. That she was using Grace as some sort of human shield.”

John was barely keeping his anger in check and Sherlock knew he had to defuse him.

“Mary likely thought they wouldn't risk harming Grace.” When John opened his mouth to reply, Sherlock continued. “That is actually how a human shield works, you're right.”

“Well, she was wrong about that, wasn't she?”

~ + ~

Sherlock lay in bed, listening to John's morning routine and feeling a coward for not wanting to face his friend after the previous evening's conversation. He could tell from the noise of banging cupboards and thumping dishes that John knew Sherlock was avoiding him and wasn't impressed by it.

When the flat was quiet, Sherlock still didn't move. The morning was unseasonably warm and his room was stuffy; Sherlock could feel a headache coming on, but he still lay there. Part of him wanted to just crawl under the duvet and ignore the world in general until John returned home from the clinic and brought the world back with him. But doing so wouldn't get the murder case solved, and there was no point in taking the case if he wasn't going to bother working on it.

Sherlock couldn't help but admire the irony of his current situation. For all the years that John had dated, all the woman who had drifted in and out of their lives, none of them had really met Sherlock's standards. He'd liked Sarah; she'd had real promise. But the General Shan Experience had put her on edge and the relationship had petered out once she realised she was a distant third in John's priorities. The less said the better about Karen, conventionally attractive but the most boring woman in the world. The nagging and perpetually jealous teacher had hardly been an improvement. 

And then when Sherlock had returned there'd been Mary, the only one of John's girlfriends who made no effort to come between them. She'd waited patiently while John scampered after Sherlock on their adventures, and had understood from the beginning how much they'd meant to John. Sherlock acknowledged that that should, on reflection, have been a clue. Of all the women in John's life in the years Sherlock had known him, Mary had never once come between them while she was alive. But now she did in death, and Sherlock didn't know what to make of that.

He wondered if it was just one of those situations where he needed to leave John alone to sort himself out. Sherlock resolved to keep their interactions focused on the case; this should minimise the drama and give them something productive to talk about.

So Sherlock flung himself out of bed and forced himself to do something useful with his day. After breakfast, he went back to his notes.

A few minutes into reviewing the file, he stopped, then flipped back to one of the first pages: a printout from the University College London student database he'd hacked into earlier in the week. Her student record contained the usual information about her admission, her marks, graduation status, etc. Sherlock stared at the date of birth listed: 25 March 1954.

Sherlock knew that date. He knew that he knew it and he was 99% sure he knew where he knew it from. He leapt off the sofa and dove into the box of files from Lestrade's cold cases. And there it was, a copy of a newspaper article about a girl who'd run away in May 1971: Deborah Oppenheimer. The article listed her birthdate. It was the same.

Sherlock had been correct all those weeks ago. His Deborah Oppenheimer had been the same girl as the Deborah Oppenheimer that had disappeared from her family home in Golders Green in 1971. After all, how many Deborah Oppenheimers could have been born that day?

Sherlock remembered the woman's cool nonchalance when he'd told her about that cold case, asked her about her name, her past. She hadn't batted an eye at the mention of that runaway girl. And Sherlock suspected it hadn't been just steely resolve and excellent acting; perhaps to Deborah that girl really was a different person, one she'd abandoned long ago like a snake shedding its skin.

Could it be a coincidence? Sherlock hated to rely on statistics and preconceptions, not for something this important, so he spent a moderately diverting morning hacking into the government's birth registration database and searched for other Deborah Oppenheimers. And to his lack of surprise there was only one born in 1954. The only conclusion that Sherlock could draw was either that one of them lied about her date of birth for some reason, or that they were the same person.

Sherlock sat at the desk, staring out the window, wondering why he had difficulty accepting this fact. Then he speculated on whether he was losing his mind, or if Mycroft had been correct all these years and the drugs really had killed off a critical volume of his brain mass. Sherlock flipped to the beginning of the file and there in front of him was a tiny fact that threw his research into the ditch.

He picked up his phone and texted John. He could probably have just found the answer on-line, but he wanted an impeachable source, not some random stranger.

_How much does the av. woman shrink in height b/w ages 17 & 60? SH_

_Yes it's for the case. SH_

Sherlock paced for 7 minutes, 18 seconds before the reply arrived.

_Depends on orig height, family history. Osteoporosis?_

Sherlock thumbs flew as he typed. _No osteo I could see. Orig 5ft5in. SH_

_1 maybe 2 in, barring illness, accident, etc_

Sherlock stared at the screen. How tall had Doctor Deborah been? He couldn't be sure, exactly. Evil elf-sized, the voice in the back of his head chimed in, though that wasn't helpful. Sherlock knew he was exactly 5' tall at the shoulder; had she been taller than that? A little, he remembered, but certainly not as much as three inches. At that height she'd have been able to see over his shoulder without standing on tiptoe, and he knew she hadn't been able to do that. 

He remembered their walk from Kew Station to the Archives, and there was no way her head had been more than an inch and a half above his shoulder. So unless she'd suffered some illness or genetic defect that caused her to shrink more than three inches, his Deborah Oppenheimer couldn't be the same person as the girl who had run away from home in 1971. But why would she use someone else's birthdate for her university application? There was only one reason Sherlock could think of. And if that was the case, who had Doctor Deborah really been?

~ + ~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As I am not a doctor, I have no idea how much a person might shrink between the ages of 17 and 60. Apologies to any medical personnel for any mistakes on the matter. Think of it as fitting in with the long tradition of being hand-wavy with facts and science in the realm of Sherlock Holmes iterations.


	3. A distinct lack of familial affection

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a deduction occurs and grievances are aired.

After their only partially-successful jaunt to Oxford, Sherlock had contacted his client about interceding on their behalf with the widow. Christina hadn't appeared surprised that The Incredibly Well-Connected Maris had refused to speak with them, and promised to plead their case and hopefully arrange a meeting.

At the time, Sherlock had wanted to ask Christina who might have been blackmailing Deborah, but thought it unlikely she would know. Once Sherlock had deduced that Deborah had been living under a false identity at least since she'd gone to university, he'd also been tempted to ask his client if she'd known. But he reasoned that if she had and had wanted to share that with Sherlock she would have done so at their meeting the previous week. And until she came through with the widow, Christina was most valuable to him as a means of making that happen. Until then he needed to treat her with kid gloves. So he sat on his suspicions and let the case play out on its own for a few days.

After the information that John had confirmed that morning, Sherlock went back over his notes on the Klein case just to ensure there was no possibility he might have missed something, and to eliminate any possibility that his Deborah _might_ have been Rose Klein's younger sister, the Deborah Oppenheimer who had run away from home in 1971.

When John arrived home from the clinic that evening, he brought up Sherlock's questions about height shrinkage and osteoporosis and asked how it related to the case.

Sherlock glanced over his laptop screen to where John was sprawled on the sofa. “Deborah Oppenheimer—the woman I knew as Deborah Oppenheimer—was, to my estimate, between five foot one and five foot two in height. Yet, according to the police report from 1971, the Deborah Oppenheimer who disappeared was five foot five.”

“Yeah, that's pretty extreme height change. Unless she had a hump.”

“A hump?”

John pointed over his shoulder to the top of his back. “Dowager's hump. You know. Osteoporosis.”

 _Of course._ “Nope. No hump.”

“Sounds like a different person to me.”

“Sherlock smiled. “My thoughts exactly.”

“Interesting wrinkle. Do you think Mycroft's friend knows?”

“I'm not going to ask until she comes through with the widow. Asking is just going to irritate her.”

“Why?”

“Because either she doesn't know, or she does and doesn't want us to.”

“So our victim really isn't Deborah Oppenheimer. That's going to throw a spanner in things.”

“Possibly. It might provide a clue as to motive, though.”

“How?”

“Deborah once told me that in the past someone had been blackmailing her.”

John nodded. “They knew who she really was.”

“Probably.” Sherlock paused as an inconvenient niggle at the back of his mind shouted for his attention. “Though she didn't say when the blackmail had taken place, only that it had stopped. It might have been decades ago.”

“So it might not be relevant.”

Sherlock shrugged. “Only the widow will be able to tell us.” His phone pinged and he was pleased to see that it was Christina. 

_Friday 1:30. Go alone. Don't be late._

_Hints? SH_ he replied immediately.

_Think posh, weirder version of D._

_I'm on tenterhooks. SH_ He turned to John. “We shall see on Friday.”

“That her?” John gestured at Sherlock's phone.

“The former Lady Moran, yes.”

A minute later a follow-up text arrived from her: _You're welcome._

Sherlock contemplated sending an equally snarky reply, but decided against it. He knew it wouldn't be a good idea to alienate her while she might still be useful.

~ + ~

“It's like time stood still in here.”

Sherlock glanced up to see the second-to-last person he wanted standing in his doorway. “Donovan,” he muttered as he turned his attention back to his computer. “What does Lestrade want that's so outrageous he's afraid to ask himself?”

“Don't flatter yourself—”

“It's never flattery with me, Sally.”

“Yeah, whatever.” She ambled into the room, casting her policeman's eye over it, as if she was expecting Sherlock to leave his drugs out in plain sight.

Sherlock watched John watch her; she pretended to not see John and Sherlock was curious if she would before she left. Perhaps she knew if she did she would have to give her condolences, while at the same time being unable or unwilling to for some reason. Refusing to acknowledge the existence of death seemed a strange quirk for a police officer, especially one who saw dead people on a regular basis. Sherlock wondered as she stalked around the room, agitated, if dead strangers were less real to her than dead people she'd known in life, so less bothersome.

“If you've not come to fetch us to Lestrade, why are you here?” Sherlock asked once it became apparent she wasn't going to offer that information.

Her shoulders hitched further back and her chin raised one third of an inch, so Sherlock realised it had to be something she knew would make him happy.

“Lestrade told me to tell you myself.”

 _Aha. So he did make her do some legwork._ Sherlock leant back in his chair. “Tell me what?”

She pursed her lips for a moment before answering, as if she had to use brute force to get the words out. Sherlock knew then that it was going to be _good_. “Your missing girl.”

Sherlock's heart leapt. “Which one?” he replied, ensuring he sounded as bored as she would expect him to.

“The one you told the boss faked her own death.”

John was suddenly paying attention to their conversation, Sherlock noticed. “What about her?”

Sally continued to ignore John and addressed Sherlock. “You were right.” Her mouth then snapped shut like an airlock. For Lestrade's sake Sherlock resolutely vowed to not crow until after she'd left. John opened his mouth to reply and Sherlock stopped him with a raised hand, allowing Sally to continue. “We found her in the NHS records eight months after she was supposed to be dead. She went to Casualty in Liverpool. Same name, same date of birth. Either it was her or someone pretending to be her.”

Sherlock smiled and Donovan recoiled at the sight. She waited a few seconds for his response and when it didn't come headed for the door. “You're welcome,” she fired at him as she left.

“Donovan's back to her old self, I see,” John said from the sofa as he turned the page of his newspaper.

Sherlock just made a low grumbling sound in reply. Suddenly, his work on Deborah's murder lost 78% of its interest and he immediately switched to Carol Evans. It wasn't as though he would be able to accomplish much on it until he spoke to the widow on Friday, he justified to himself as he opened up his tracking spreadsheet on the Carol Evans case. 

An internet search revealed that there were a lot of Carol Evanses. Even limiting his search to Facebook revealed more than a thousand. It was obvious that if Carol Evans was alive and still using that identity, she'd have left Britain in 1972 or soon after. So he conducted a number of searches limited to the countries she would most likely have moved to, in order of probability: Australia, Canada, America, Ireland.

In the end, it was remarkably simple; social media again proved a boon to detectives everywhere. In less than an hour, Sherlock had identified his best prospects: a retired school teacher in Portland, Oregon and an estate agent in Melbourne. The teacher he eliminated when he discovered Evans was her married name. The Melbourne Carol, according to the website for her firm, had been an estate agent since shortly after arriving in Australia in 1973. He then logged onto Facebook using his false research account and found her personal Facebook page. And there it all was: her birthdate (the same), and a vacation photo from 2009 entitled _Back in the old country to watch Oz pummel the Brits_. In an act of astonishing gall, she was standing in front of the Grace Gates at Lord's. 

Sherlock wondered at that; it was remarkably stupid and sloppy. If you were on the run from the authorities and your family, why would you have a Facebook account with all your personal information open to anyone? Why make it easy for anyone to find you? Was it overconfidence? Did she think there was no one left looking for her? Even though the ease with which he found her made Sherlock hesitate, he still downloaded copies of a few photos from her Facebook and a head shot from her firm's website. Then he fired up one of his favourite acquisitions “borrowed” from the Met, software which simulated aging of faces in photographs. He ran the photo used in the press coverage of Carol Evans' disappearance in 1971.

While he waited for the program to do its job and render the image, John looked up as he folded up his newspaper. “Find anything?”

“Perhaps. I may have found her.”

“Already? Where?”

“Australia. The perils of equating distance with safety. People born before the internet almost always forget there's no such thing as secrecy anymore. Though this—” He gestured to the screen. “—is a degree of stupidity I wouldn't have expected from her. Convenient for me, but—”

“Why put yourself all over the net if you've been on the run for 40 years. Yeah, not the brightest.” John peered at the screen. “You sure that's really her?”

Sherlock turned to look at the now fully-rendered, artificially aged version of Carol Evans in 1971, and compared it to the headshot on her firm's website. There was nothing obviously wrong-looking about it. There was a reasonable resemblance, but Sherlock thought it likely there'd be a thousand Australian women her age he could say that about.

In an effort to obtain a control test of the software, Sherlock opened the scan of the 1971 photo of the run-away Deborah Oppenheimer and ran it through. While he waited he returned to the aged photo of Carol Evans; the more he looked at it, the less he believed the Australian woman was his Carol Evans. As the software began to render the aged version of the Deborah Oppenheimer photo, John leant over Sherlock's shoulder to take a closer look.

“Oh yeah, that's her,” John said when the photo was only half completed. He pointed at the screen. “See the cheekbones, the asymmetry. I'd bet her left one was broken when she was a kid.”

At those words, Sherlock knew what he would see. He turned in his chair and stared at the second rendered photo. Leaning forward, he peered intently at the aged version of the eighteen year-old girl from Leeds who had faked her own death, deceived the entire Metropolitan Police Services, crafted a cunning series of clues to lead them astray, and daringly left them to be found by the public. Then he imagined her sixty years old, with close-cropped grey hair, a sardonic smile on her face and a surreptitious cigarette in her hand, and he wanted to curl up into a ball with the shame of not having noticed the similar facial features. How could he not have seen it himself?

He had had her. Right in front of him. For ten weeks he had gone to her home, traded whiskey and insults, poked and prodded her intellectual armature, in turn ignored and annoyed her, then watched her die not three feet away from him.

“Sherlock, you okay?”

“No.” Sherlock stood, then forced himself to walk calmly to his bedroom and close the door behind him with a quiet click. He sat on his bed. And then he allowed himself to weep for her.

~ + ~

The next morning, Sherlock was surprised to see John up early. The other man didn't turn to face him as he grunted a brief greeting, which instantly put Sherlock on alert. While John continued to find his steeping tea fascinating, Sherlock hovered in the doorway. After a second or two, he realised he was being ridiculous; there was no reason for John to be angry with him, so he obviously wasn't.

Within fifteen seconds it was equally obvious that somehow Sherlock had been wrong on that point and the realisation cleared the emotional fog Sherlock had been swamped by since the previous evening. John was exhibiting the particular clenched-jawed silence that Sherlock knew from experience meant that John wasn't allowing himself to speak because he couldn't trust himself to not say something he'd regret. Sherlock also knew from experience that almost anything he said to try to defuse the situation would just make it worse, and in this state of mind John wouldn't be jollied or joked out of it. Whatever the cause, John had to address the matter in his own mind and all Sherlock could do was wait for it to pass.

“What are you up to today?” Sherlock essayed, assuming that at least this subject was safe.

“Thought I might go to the house. Start—” John paused and Sherlock saw his shoulders straighten back, as if he was preparing to shoulder a horrible burden.

“Do you want me—”

“No.” John turned then and scrubbed a hand over his face. “Sorry. I need to—I should go alone.”

“Okay.” Sherlock was relieved; after the recent shock he wasn't sure he was up to facing John and Mary's house and all the memories that resided there.

“What about you?”

“Bart's. Molly promised me some more lung tissue samples. A former miner, so excellent pneumoconiosis—”

A pained look appeared on John's face. “Okay.”

This response surprised Sherlock; John had never been squeamish about his research before. He mentally shrugged, then turned his attention to the newspaper.

Sherlock hated to admit it to himself, but he was glad to be on his way twenty minutes later. The tension in the flat was palpable; neither of them seemed themselves and Sherlock hated the awkwardness of not knowing why John was suddenly so upset. 

When he arrived at the morgue and was instantly surrounded by the familiar, comforting smells of science and death, Sherlock felt himself relax. Until his body released it, he hadn't been aware how much tension he'd been carrying around. Molly greeted him with her usual forced off-handedness, attempting and failing to appear diffident about his presence.

“How's John?” she eventually asked.

“Fine, as of 9.17 this morning.” There was a hint of scepticism underneath her usual twitchiness. “What?”

“Nothing. Just—is he really? You're not just saying that?”

“Yeeeesss. John is fine, to the chagrin of meddling females everywhere.”

She frowned. “He can't be, Sherlock. He's just pretending because he doesn't want to be a burden to anyone. But—”

“Leave him be. He's—coping.”

“I'm not—I mean—what's he doing right now?”

“Stop meddling.”

“It's not meddling. I care.”

Sherlock stiffened and glared down at her. “Are you implying—”

She backtracked immediately. “No, no, I'm—”

“You're what,” he snapped.

“You could stop shouting at me. That would—” She drew a deep breath as if to buck up her courage. Sherlock brushed aside his shame at having upset her; none of the current turmoil in his life was her fault. “That would be a good start,” she continued.

“I'm sorry.” Sherlock forced himself to reply in what even Mycroft would acknowledge as civil tones, though he knew it was driven more by exhaustion and resignation than manners. “What do you want from me, Molly? Really?”

He watched her as she began to toy with the buttons of her lab coat; it was one of her most obvious tells that she was nervous.

“I want you to help John.”

Sherlock didn't bother hiding his affront at the suggestion he wasn't. “I am.”

“No, you're not. You're not talking to him—”

“I talk to him every day. What are you—”

“You know what I mean. About what happened.”

“John already has a therapist. Admittedly, not a very good therapist, but he pays her to listen when he feels the need to 'talk to someone' about his feelings. I am _not_ his therapist.” He paused and let her absorb the fact that to him seemed obvious. “Can you imagine me in one of the 'caring professions'?”

Molly couldn't help a choked off chuckle and Sherlock was glad to see that his strategy for getting her to back down was successful. But then, he'd always been able to get her to do what he wanted.

“John needs your help.”

“I know. He needs yours, as well.” 

“But he doesn't want _my_ help. I'd do a anything for him. Either of you, of course. But it has to be you, Sherlock. You're his best friend. The rest of us, we matter to him, but not like you.” She took a step closer and peered up at him. “You do know that, don't you?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then you have to let him know he doesn't need to pretend to be okay for your sake.”

 _That you won't break down and go back on drugs if he needs you_ , Sherlock heard between her words. “He doesn't think that.”

“Yeah, he does. A bit. He told me—well.” She gave him her familiar apologetic half-smile. “He implied—when I talked to him that day at your flat. He was more concerned about how you were doing than grieving himself.”

“That's—” 

“I know.”

“You have no idea what I was going to say.”

“Yes, I do.”

She was allowing them to step back to the relief of banter, Sherlock was glad to see. Being backed into a corner by her had caused the knots in his shoulders to reassert themselves, to his annoyance. When he didn't respond, she seemed to accept that this was the closest thing to an olive branch she was going to get, so without another word she went to get his tissue samples. Sherlock turned around, examining the room; he realised just how much time he'd spent in that room over the previous eight years, barring his two years away. Mycroft's snide description of it as Sherlock's home away from home was, as usual with Mycroft's observations, annoyingly accurate. Sherlock wondered what that said about him, that he was more comfortable surrounded by the dead than by the living.

“So, what are you working on now?” Molly asked as she returned from the freezer and handed him the box of slides.

“Murder case.” He shrugged, deciding not to share any details that might cause MI5 to develop a sudden interest in her. “Moderately interesting, with a hint of blackmail to spice things up a bit.”

“That's nice. Is John working with you?”

“As his schedule allows.” 

“He's back at the clinic already?”

“Molly—” Sherlock started, warning.

She held up her hands. “Okay. Just—don't let him bury himself in work. He needs—he needs space to deal with things.”

Sherlock suspected that that space was going to be John and Mary's house in the suburbs, the physical manifestation of John's shattered delusions of normality. “Yes, well.” He tucked the box of slides into his pocket, then patted it. “Thank you.” 

“You're welcome. Let me know if you need anything.”

“I will.” He gave her a quick, thin smile and headed home, all the while dogged by an unfamiliar sense of having failed the one person in his life who he could usually rely on to not question his judgement. He hated it.

~ + ~

Over the breakfast table on Friday morning, Sherlock was slightly anxious, though he didn't like to acknowledge it. He'd told John that Christina had instructed him to go alone to speak to Maris Featherstonhaugh; at the time John hadn't seemed to care about being left out. This morning, though, he'd obviously changed his mind. Sherlock disliked seeing it; one of the principal attractions of their current case was that it was supposed to allow the two of them to work together on something interesting. That it gave Sherlock a reason to get John out of the flat and the two of them back to their old selves. And now obstacles kept popping up to block that plan, Christina's instructions just the latest. John was probably now considering his exclusion a slight.

“You know my preference would be to have you along,” Sherlock sent across the dining table as a first tentative sounding.

“Yeah, sure.” John turned the page of his newspaper.

“I'm only following the client's instructions.”

John made a non-committal noise as he chased his last forkful of eggs around his plate.

“It's not meant as a personal critique, I'm sure. Even Deborah mentioned that her wife was a bit strange. Perhaps she has some sort of social phobia—”

“Sherlock, it's fine.” John finally looked at him and Sherlock could tell he was actually _not_ fine about it. Or perhaps John was not fine about something else, but regardless, John was upset and didn't want to talk about it. Then Molly's words echoed in his head and he roughly pushed them aside. 

“John, whatever—if you feel the need to talk—”

To Sherlock's tremendous relief, John held up his hand to put a stop to the awkward verbal bumbling. “No need.” John gave an irritated, choked off little sigh. “Thank you. But—really not necessary.”

The man's tone did nothing to allay Sherlock's concern, but at least the next time Molly or anyone else accused him of being insensitive to John's “grieving process” Sherlock could categorically inform them that he had offered his services as agony aunt and John had unequivocally refused. Sherlock gave himself a mental pat on the back for—not surprisingly—having been the best judge of his friend's needs.

Two hours later, as Sherlock headed out to Oxford for his meeting, he was of two minds about the fact that he was going alone. The inexplicable tension between him and John for the last few days was annoying, and Sherlock didn't think bringing it to the meeting would be productive. John could be prickly around members of the Establishment at the best of times, and Sherlock couldn't be sure that John would behave himself in his current state of mind. On the other hand, working without him was an uncomfortable reminder of the three months after Magnussen, when John abandoned Sherlock to MI5, leaving him to deal with the Moriarty case on his own. Sherlock was still torn between being angry at John for that and acknowledging that he might not really have the right to be. But the death of the elder Moriarty brother seemed to have put the matter to bed, allowing Sherlock to leave it unresolved. 

By the time he managed to find a cab at Oxford station, he was running late; not a good start, he knew. When he arrived at the familiar house north of the town, he was a little flustered. He waited a moment to collect himself before ringing the doorbell. The little brass sign next to it was still there, which instantly reminded him of his first visit to the house and Sherlock felt a twinge of nostalgia and a brief flush of agitation as he recalled how he'd misjudged Deborah. Twenty-three seconds later, heels approaching on the flagstone floor pulled him out of his self-indulgent reverie.

When he was finally face-to-face with Deborah's partner of more than thirty years, he knew instantly that he needed to be on his guard. Not just against her, but against his own sentiments for the deceased. And the woman stirred up his instinctual revulsion of and desire to subvert anyone so unashamedly posh, and Sherlock had always hated posh people and their fatuous pretensions.

They made the requisite polite noises at each other, then she led him into the sitting room. Sherlock didn't bother to hide his curiosity about it. Other than his blood-soaked trek from the conservatory to the front door the day of the shooting, he'd never been in the main part of the house. As Maris poured tea, he glanced around. It was obvious the room wasn't used much; formal, tasteful and bland, it didn't correspond to any of his recollections of Doctor Deborah. He decided it must reflect the taste of the woman in front of him, though he wondered how someone so ordinary-seeming might have caught the attention of the former Carol Evans. He hoped for Deborah's sake that there was more to Maris Featherstonhaugh than met the eye.

She watched him, a polite but distant half-smile on her face. It was the kind of face his mother used on the vicar or the chair of the local WI when they were being particularly tedious. The smile shaded very slightly into expectation, and Sherlock found himself even less interested in social pleasantries than usual, so he decided to just plunge right in.

“Thank you for agreeing to see me, Ms Featherstonhaugh.”

“Maris, please.”

“Maris. I'm not sure what Christina Martin told you, but I'm assuming she mentioned that she has employed me to find out who was responsible for your wife's death.” He paused, but she seemed uninterested in commenting, so he continued. “I've examined the site where the sniper hid, but there's little physical evidence.”

Her face remained sphinx-like, serene, and displayed no evidence she was planning to join in the conversation.

“My focus from this point will be determining who might have had a motive for blowing your wife's brains out in the conservatory.”

Sherlock had expected that statement to garner _some_ reaction, but he was disappointed. The woman had a poker face that would do Mycroft proud, to Sherlock's consternation. He wondered if Christina had told Maris all of this already; though the widow appeared to have no interest in finding out who was responsible. Perhaps she already knew. Perhaps she knew she'd be next on the hit parade if she started displaying any curiosity about the matter. But her finally agreeing to meet him must mean _something_ , he assumed.

He suppressed a sigh and continued. “For most murders, motive is based on an event immediately before the murder, or a secret in the victim's past. I've already discovered a number of facts about Deborah's background, so you needn't bother with mundanities. Mostly I wanted to know why she'd been living under a false identity since 1971, and who else might have known.” He flicked her a quick smile and the only response it elicited was a tiny, almost silent sigh. It was as if she'd known beforehand everything he was going to ask, and his lack of creativity disappointed her. He almost asked if she'd been briefed by his brother, but he knew that would be a waste of time.

“You did already know she wasn't really Deborah Oppenheimer? I hope I haven't shocked you with a lifelong secret.”

“Yes, I knew.”

 _Finally!_ “But you don't care.”

“My feelings on the matter are hardly relevant to your investigation. Unless I'm a suspect, of course. Am I a suspect?” 

He knew her last question was more provocation than actual question, so he ignored it. “Do you know who else was aware of her real identity?”

“Deborah Oppenheimer _was_ her real identity for more than forty years.”

“Did your father know?”

She cocked an eyebrow and Sherlock considered that a small victory. “Of course. She might even have told him before she told me.”

“Before he found it out himself, you mean.”

That earned him a real, if not overly friendly, smile. “Your brother's been indiscreet.”

“My brother's already proved that he prefers to hand me over to MI5's tender mercies than give me anything resembling useful intelligence.”

“How is Mycroft these days? Seems an age since I've seen him.”

“Unchanged, like the lava lizards of the Galapagos Islands. When did Deborah tell you?”

She didn't so much as blink at the _non sequitur_. “We'd been together, oh, five years. Six, maybe. It was a very long time ago.” She paused. “You think someone was blackmailing Deborah over her secret? And that they killed her because of it?”

“No, I think they killed her for some other reason. But I believe that it was the same person who had been blackmailing her. How many enemies do you think she had?”

“Because she'd found a way to get out from under it, I suppose. Yes, there's a certain logic in that.”

Sherlock loved talking to people who could do sums without counting on their fingers—such a rare pleasure, though if she'd answered more than half his questions, he'd be a lot happier. “I need to narrow the field of candidates.”

She nodded and Sherlock could tell she was giving the question some thought, so he forced himself to wait quietly while she decided whether or not she'd help him.

“I'm afraid I may not be of much assistance. Other than my father, I don't know with any certainty. I would guess that your brother knows. But then, Mycroft always likes to give people the impression he knows things he doesn't, so I couldn't say with any certainty.” Sherlock did his utmost to not react to that statement. “Elizabeth Smallwood's always been a dark horse. She often knows things you wouldn't expect her to, so perhaps she knew about Deborah. Sir Frances Fanshawe, who was at the Home Office, he—I suppose you'd say he held a position similar to your brother's, before his ascent; he most likely would have known. He passed away two years ago, though. And I very much doubt he told anyone; he was the most discreet man I've ever met.”

“And what about current Home Office staff? Or MI5?”

“I've no idea, I'm afraid.”

Sherlock hid his consternation. “Did she ever discuss her working relationship with anyone there?”

“No, nor should she have. I hardly had security clearance for that.”

“No, I don't mean operations. Did she ever discuss any of the people? Were there particular people she mentioned on a regular basis?”

“Well, Sir Edwin Blythe, of course. He was nominally her superior—indirectly—when they used her services, but she didn't really have much to do with him.”

“What did she think of him?”

“She never talked about him. I know she wasn't fond of him, but I can't imagine anyone would be. Have you met him?”

“Once.”

A hint of a smirk briefly appeared on her face. “Memorable, was it?”

“I can't take seriously a bureaucrat who strives to behave like a minor Bond villain.”

Her polite, distant smile widened a millimetre or two and finally reached her eyes. “Yes, I can imagine. He's like—a slightly less intelligent, much more ambitious version of your brother.”

“Is that your personal opinion or Deborah's?”

“Mine. She just thought he was a pompous tit.”

Sherlock chuckled. “Did you ever suspect he knew her secret?”

“No.”

“And there's no one else you can think of? Did she have no friends from her school days?”

“That would have been remarkably lax of her.”

 _Idiot, Sherlock!_ he berated himself. “From medical school. Hobbies. Clubs.”

“No, none that I know of.”

Sherlock paused. It was obvious she either didn't know more or was resolved to not tell him. He suspected the latter, though he couldn't see any clear evidence she was lying. So either she wasn't or she was exceptionally well-trained, which wouldn't be unheard of, considering her family connections to the Intelligence services. In the end she had just confirmed Sherlock's suspicions: that Deborah's death most likely had been fallout from some intra-agency warfare going on within the security services. And while that narrowed his slate of candidates, it narrowed it to some of the best protected, most secretive people in Britain.

Maris watched him as he made his way down the analytical pathway to this conclusion, and Sherlock could tell either she knew more or wanted him to think she did. Before the whole Magnussen fiasco, he'd never come across anyone who reminded him of Mycroft, and now they seemed to be crawling out of the woodwork. But he decided that while Maris might refuse to discuss Deborah's MI5 work, she might be willing to satisfy his curiosity on more personal matters relating to her dead wife.

“Did she ever tell you how she did it?”

The woman didn't seem surprised by his change of direction. Sherlock wondered if perhaps what he had originally ascribed to an excellent poker face was, in fact, the result of Botox or an extremely underwhelming personality. “Not in any detail. It was still quite fresh for her when we first began— I think she was afraid of being caught. And after—” She shrugged. “It never seemed worthwhile to discuss.”

“So she never told you why she chose those sites. Where she left the clues for the police to find.”

“Not really. Not explicitly. There were a few hints over the years, nothing more.” Maris paused and Sherlock thought she might be regretting admitting that to him, and he swallowed his disappointment to focus on trying to finagle her into talking. “As you can imagine, Deborah always had a fraught relationship with her past. From what little she said over the years, it seems as though she and her parents never got on.”

“Her running away from home and faking her death in a way to maximise the distress to her parents would indicate a distinct lack of familial affection, yes.”

Maris' eyes crinkled ever so slightly, and Sherlock settled on Botox.

“Deborah’s parents were both of quite modest backgrounds. From what she said, they liked to think themselves a bit above those around them.”

“They were working class snobs.”

“It was impossible to tell; Deborah was never able to be reasonable about her family. But then, who of us can say we are?” Sherlock could discern no particular weight to the statement, so decided it hadn't been directed at him. “They were most likely perfectly unobjectionable people. Though there were certain pretensions to culture that Deborah found loathsome.”

“Did the family have any connections to the military? The War Museum threw me off.”

“I don’t believe so. Perhaps her father was one of those men who wittered on about the war. He'd have been too young to serve, I would guess. Perhaps he felt inadequate, as older men around him recounted their ‘heroics’. My father’s younger brother did that; it was most annoying. As if war is some sort of boy’s own adventure that they’d missed out on; you’d think the first war would have taught them the folly of that attitude.” 

“Were they one of those families that visited museums to acquire ‘culture’? I can see it now, father staring pensively at pre-Raphaelites, stroking his chin and having no idea what he was looking at. Mother going on about ‘knowing what she likes’ and thinking anything modern was ‘nasty’.”

Maris laughed, the first sign of real animation Sherlock had seen, so it startled him a bit. “Deborah was right; you are a horrible snob.”

“So says the grand-daughter of an earl.”

“It's a very _minor_ earldom. And the poor thing never had a bean. He married down for money, then wasted it all on wine, women and association football.”

Sherlock suppressed the laugh he knew she'd been trying for. Though it was promising for his cause that she was at least pretending to unbend a little and appear to be willing now to engage with him. “So. She faked her death to escape a family she despised.”

“I imagine the feeling might have been mutual, all things considered.”

Sherlock was about to ask for clarification, then stopped. _Of course._ While Deborah's name may have changed in 1971, he couldn't imagine her fundamental nature had. She'd told her family she was a lesbian, or they'd found out because she'd been indiscreet. They'd rejected her, denied her, or perhaps even had overtly tried to “fix” her, and her faked death scheme had been her revenge. “She was an extraordinary woman,” he finally replied, making no effort to hide the real emotion behind the comment.

“In certain ways,” Maris agreed with a tiny nod and smile of recognition. “But in thirty-two years I wasn't able to get her to do a thing around the house, so perhaps as demanding as she was worthy.”

Sherlock thought he might have caught in her tone the first hint of something—wistfulness, perhaps—that indicated that Maris Featherstonhaugh might actually miss the inconsistently extraordinary person she'd shared her life with. Sherlock tried not to think that it was put on to cause him to like her a little and therefore let down his guard. “Do you think she miscalculated—” 

“Mr Holmes. I believe I know what you came here to try to find out, and I'm afraid I can't help you.” She paused and appeared to change her mind about what she was going to say. “I don't know what Christina has told you, and to be honest I don't know what she hopes to accomplish by employing you to pursue this matter.”

“You don't care to know who's responsible?”

“Will knowing bring her back? Will knowing improve my life in any way? Will the truth be of any benefit to anyone?”

“That's a remarkably jaded point of view.” _And disappointing._

“No, just realistic.” She gave him an almost sympathetic look. “I've been swimming in these waters since before you were born, Sherlock, and one thing I've learnt is how to distinguish between necessity and personal indulgence.”

That was that, then, Sherlock knew. He wasn't going to get anything else out of her. The best he could hope for was that she didn't tell everyone she knew not to talk to him.

After engaging in the obligatory _politesse_ and leaving, Sherlock turned his mind to Maris' likely reasons for refusing to tell him much that was relevant to the actual murder case. The impression that the widow knew, or thought she knew, that the murder had been related to Deborah's MI5 work was telling. She'd known Deborah best, regardless of her protestations of knowing nothing about her wife's work. Sherlock wondered if Deborah had been living under some sort of threat beyond the blackmail. Had they known there was another, more tangible threat hanging over her? If so, what had caused that person to choose to act when they did? Was the person behind the murder the same person who'd been blackmailing Deborah? And how might it have been related to her role as Sherlock's handler? 

Considering what he'd had to go through to speak to Maris Feathersonhaugh, he couldn't help being disappointed with having gained so little for his pains. He felt hardly any closer to a solution, and he couldn't help being angry at having his time wasted. He'd accomplished little more than eliminate some of the most unlikely scenarios from the list of possibilities. The data was drifting towards the centre of the bell curve, but this didn't help him much. If his supposition (and Maris' obvious assumptions or knowledge) that Deborah's murderer was within the SIS, who were the suspects? Blythe, obviously, as the person who had worked most closely with her. And Mycroft, of course, because Mycroft always had to be a suspect whenever someone connected to Sherlock unexpectedly ended up dead.

What was his next step? Sherlock knew he would have only one opportunity to get near whoever was responsible. His tactical strike would need to be perfectly aimed, unerring and swift; if it was someone within the security services, they would be able to make counter-moves that Sherlock might not have the resources to repel and he'd lose them.

As the train trundled back to London, Sherlock's exhilaration at the prospect managed to finally leaven the shame and grief for Deborah he'd felt since learning who she really was. But he had the satisfying prospect of a meaningful fight, at least. Battle against a worthy opponent: this was worth getting out of bed for. This was worth sacrificing almost anything to win, even if it meant diving back into the SIS, from whom he'd just managed to extricate himself. Unfortunately, returning to that world meant tucking his tail between his legs and going begging back to his brother, a loathsome idea. Then he realised he had another option, one who owed him a favour.

~ + ~

When Sherlock arrived home from his solitary Oxford jaunt, he found John sitting on the sofa in the dark, staring at nothing in particular. For a few seconds Sherlock stood in the doorway watching, wondering if he should ask John if he had gone to the house, as he'd planned.

Eventually, John noticed him standing there; he turned and seemed to rise slowly out of his thoughts, drawing in a long, deep breath. “How was it?”

“Fine.”

“Get anything useful?”

“Perhaps.”

“You still upset?”

Sherlock looked over as he hung up his coat and scarf, then turned on the light, immediately on guard at John's expression. “Upset about what?”

“That woman.”

“What woman?”

“The girl who'd faked her death. The one you were going on about a month ago like you were in love with her and you just figured out you'd known. _That_ woman.”

Sherlock was really not in the mood for an argument about Deborah now that he was just over his annoyance at getting little useful information out of her widow. “Oh her. I wasn't upset.”

“Uh, yes you were. I've never seen you—” John was becoming agitated and Sherlock wondered if he was going to have to take his laptop to his room to be able to work. John's voice was more tightly controlled when he resumed. “It's all right to grieve, you know. For her. Have you ever lost anyone you cared for before?”

Sherlock resisted the impulse to thank John for his kind permission to grieve Deborah, then spent a few seconds pondering if he was in the mood to be having this particular conversation. He decided it was unlikely he'd be able to avoid it without faking his own death and camping out at Molly's again. “Define 'cared for',” he replied in tones he hopes conveyed his disinterest in pursuing the matter, while knowing from his demeanour that John would ignore them.

“Oh, for—it's obvious you cared about Irene Adler. You stole government records to have a memento of her.” Sherlock spent half a second wondering if he should tell John that that argument was null and void, but decided to let him say what he'd spent the afternoon working himself up to say. “And don't get me going about Moriarty. That freak show going on in your head about him wouldn't be if you weren't—I don't know, obsessed, in love with him, whatever. So don't give me that—bullshit—about not caring for anyone, Sherlock. That's just aping Mycroft's garbage. And I know you cared about Mary; not even you're a good enough liar to have faked that every day for a year and a half.”

“You know I did,” Sherlock snapped back, frustrated that his efforts to derail John had failed.

“It's okay to show that you cared for her. That you miss her. It's not going to make it worse for me to see that. Actually—”

Sherlock was relieved to see that John had abandoned his inexplicable interest in Sherlock's grief for Deborah, even if it was to move on to the even more fraught subject of Mary. “You've been talking to Molly.”

“Er, no. Why do you—”

Sherlock batted the ball back to John's court. “She accused me of somehow imperilling your 'grieving process'.”

“Uh huh.” John shifted on the sofa, a pained look on his face, and Sherlock knew the man was about to head off into areas neither of them would be comfortable discussing. At the thought, Sherlock felt a heavy hand close around his throat, almost like an allergy attack shutting down his respiratory system. He hid his fight to keep his breath steady, even though he knew John wouldn't notice one way or the other, engrossed as he was in his plan. “What about you? I haven't—you didn't seem upset about—well, anything until you found out your shrink friend was your missing teenaged criminal mastermind.”

“You make her sound like Moriarty's mother, or something.” John choked back a laugh and Sherlock felt the weight on his chest ease off, the rush of oxygen to his brain making him a little giddy. “Though, if she were, that would explain why he was so short.” Sherlock paused to give John the opportunity to join in the fun. When he declined to do so, he knew he wasn't going to be able to avoid the probably horrible conversation they'd been avoiding for weeks. “You know I'm not someone who indulges in emotional displays—” John snorted. “—so I apologise if I haven't been sufficiently _demonstrative_.”

John stared at him for a few seconds. “You _wept_ for her. She was practically a stranger—”

“She wasn't a stranger to me. You weren't there, John. She was the one person who was willing to help me—”

The moment stuck, like a buffering video, the two of them frozen in a tableau Sherlock mentally labelled “Mutual incomprehension.” Then John pulled back, literally and figuratively, as he took a deep breath and leant back on the sofa. Sherlock could tell he was forcing himself to not cross his arms and scowl. Ella must have told him how annoying that was.

“John, I—”

“No, let me finish, Sherlock. You—what I can't figure out—” John paused and dropped his chin to his chest with an annoyed almost-growl, then held up his hand, years of experience telling him that Sherlock was about to jump in. Once he'd collected his thoughts, he raised his head and started again. The exhaustion on his face felt like a rebuke. “When Greg came and told us what had happened, you didn't react at all. Nothing. It was like he was talking about a stranger or a client. And I thought, 'Oh, that's just Sherlock'. And then when Christina Martin came to see you and you had to tell me about Deborah Oppenheimer, it was the same. It was obvious you'd liked her, but she'd been dead for what, three weeks? And I've never seen any reaction at all to her murder. You never even mentioned her to me—”

“You've always been very clear on the point you didn't _want_ to hear about Deborah Oppenheimer, or anything—”

“Yeah, well, it would have been nice to know you had someone helping you.”

Sherlock glared at him, the reminder of John's withdrawal on the tip of his tongue, but he held back. “It's not like you've made an effort since to discover what had been going on for those three months.”

“You do _not_ get to criticise me for that,” John replied in tight warning tones. The Judgement Finger was back, to Sherlock's chagrin. “And you are _way_ out of line if you thought I should choose you over the safety of my family.” Then John added, almost off-handedly, “You didn't even grieve for her until you found out who she really was. _Then_ you wept for her. But not for Mary and definitely not for Grace. Why her? How could she possibly mean more to you than a woman you claimed to care for so much you made a vow to protect her forever. Actually, you vowed to protect Grace, too.”

Sherlock paused, avoiding John's tight, expectant expression, centred on the almost sarcastic smile that said he didn't anticipate liking the next thing Sherlock was going to say.

“It's not that I didn't grieve for Mary, John. I just—had no idea what to say.” Sherlock felt his frustration transition into annoyance; why should he have to explain himself when John refused to explain his fixation with Deborah? “Are you jealous I made another friend?”

“What?”

“Because if you are, especially considering the circumstances—”

“And you wonder why I'm the only friend you have—” 

“A friend who refused to help me on a _forty-year-old cold case_.”

John leapt to his feet and marched to the kitchen and back; Sherlock couldn't tell if John was trying to get his fit of temper under control or working himself up even more. He turned to face Sherlock, hands balled into fists at his side, with the patented John Watson Stubborn Bastard look on his face that ordinarily made Sherlock want to laugh out loud. Not now, though. “Jesus, Sherlock—You never understood how important my family was to me.”

Sherlock acknowledged to himself that they were never going to get past this until he explained things to John, even though he wouldn't want to accept what Sherlock had to say. “On the contrary. I knew better than you did.” At John's incredulous expression, Sherlock knew John wasn't going to listen, but ploughed on anyway. “I have no idea how many years you deluded yourself into believing your greatest desire was to be a boring suburban nobody, but the fact you married an assassin on the run, and were thoroughly bored with domesticity three months after the wedding speaks to a degree of conflicted emotions that even you should have been able to notice.”

John didn't respond for a few seconds, other than his scowl deepening. Then he took a deep breath. “I can't believe you were jealous of Grace.”

That really was not where Sherlock had been expecting him to go, though after Sherlock's accusation about him and Deborah he should have foreseen John would attempt to play tit-for-tat. “Jealous? What are you, a twelve year-old girl?”

“How is it different from what you—”

Sherlock gave him a dismissive wave. “Yes, yes all right. But you did just accused me of being jealous of _your child_. Of course I expected you to put them ahead of me.” Conceding that point seemed to mollify John somewhat, so Sherlock continued in his own defence. “You have no idea what happened while you buried yourself at that clinic. And how was that for classic avoidance behaviour. All those excuses, John. 'I'm working too many hours', 'Oh, it's _dangerous_ '. As if running straight into the arms of danger wasn't always your first impulse in any situation. Even Mary was starting to feel abandoned—”

“That's it.” John stomped over to the door and grabbed his coat. “You're one to accuse anyone else of being delusional,” he said as he shoved his arms into the sleeves. “You know, you haven't mentioned Grace _once_ since the accident. Mary, yeah, you'll deign to acknowledge that she deserves to be missed because she was your little enabler, your little—she was just like you. But Grace—you never accepted her in my life and what she meant to me. So as far as you're concerned the sooner she's forgotten the better. And of all the fucking petty things I've seen you do over the years, that's—that's the absolute fucking worst.” John paused, obviously wondering if he wanted to deal with the consequences of releasing the words poised on the tip of his tongue. “I was ashamed of you, before I remembered you don't believe in shame, so I was just wasting my time.” He nodded, as if saying to himself, “That's that, then,” and he headed out the door.

Sherlock sat at his desk, staring at the empty doorway for a minute. One part of his mind waited for John to realise how ridiculous he'd been and come back to apologise, while the rest of his mind berated him for being as stupid, selfish and oblivious as John accused him of being.

In a way, John had been right. He wasn't able to grieve the baby. She had been as much a stranger to him as Deborah had been to John. How could John have expected him to care for his child as he did? Babies were largely unformed proto-humans, devoid of personality, intelligence or utility for at least a decade after birth, in Sherlock's mind. Then he realised that John had expected Sherlock to care for the baby because it had been _John's_. 

After the accident, Sherlock had been expected to divine John's grief, and he ruefully acknowledged he'd miscalculated on that score, mistaking his best friend's reticence for—what, exactly? A plea for privacy? Denial? Perhaps that interpretation of John's behaviour had been a little self-serving, Sherlock recognised.

They were a mess, and it was all his fault.

Sherlock knew he had to fix this. And no token of contrition was going to suffice. He was going to have to give this some thought, because John deserved something _good_.

~ + ~


	4. Data, analysis, deduction. The usual.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock begins to collect the stray pieces of the puzzle.

When Sherlock made the call, he was pleasantly surprised to meet no resistance in his efforts to see Lady Smallwood. It was a refreshing change from all the obstreperous women in his life that needed to be coddled and wheedled to help him.

His second surprise was that he was invited to her home. Sherlock knew that meant she was anxious about the questions he'd be likely to ask and therefore wanted to meet on her own territory. He wondered if she'd finally managed to develop a guilty conscience about sending him after Magnussen unprepared. 

When they were settled in her surprisingly cosy drawing room, Sherlock launched right in, by-passing the usual social niceties.

“I understand you know Christina Martin.”

That opening was obviously not what she had been expecting.

“Yes. Not well, but we've been acquainted for a number of years.”

“She's hired me to solve a murder case.”

“Oh?”

“A former MI5 agent, also of your acquaintance. Deborah Oppenheimer. She was my handler during the broadcast hacking case.

“Yes, I know.”

“Were you involved in that decision?”

“I'm afraid I—”

“—really cannot comment. Yes, yes. Are you all assigned the same script? Or do you all just network to my brother's brain? Not that I know why I bothered asking; of course you were involved.”

She seemed to find the idea of having direct access to Mycroft's mind both amusing and horrifying. Sherlock could empathise.

“That's an interesting attitude to take, for someone here to beg my assistance.”

“I am not here to _beg_ for anything. You owe me a debt for my assistance with Magnussen.”

“A debt?” 

There was a sudden stillness with her. Sherlock recognised this particular variety of stillness; Mycroft would get just the same frozen expression when Sherlock said or did something Mycroft considered beyond the pale. It was just as annoying when someone other than his brother did it.

“Yes, a debt. I took care of—”

“Let me be very clear with you, Sherlock. Regardless—” She paused to gather herself and when she resumed her voice had returned to its usual precise, emotionless tones. “I hired you to acquire certain documents. You failed to accomplish this task. At the first hurdle, you abandoned your mission and instead pursued a personal vendetta that resulted in the deaths of my husband and Magnussen. I would very much appreciate you sharing how you came to believe this outcome in any way resembled the one you were employed to bring about.”

Sherlock had been expecting some sort of resistance, but not spite. He could hardly be blamed for her husband's death; Magnussen had been blackmailing them for months and the man decided to kill himself as some twisted Christmas gift to his family? It wasn't Sherlock's fault that the man ran out of patience; if he'd waited another 24 hours his problems would have been over.

Sherlock had to admit the woman did have a point about Magnussen, though he couldn't imagine why she was upset that the vermin was dead. Perhaps he had upset some plan of hers. You could never tell with Intelligence types. But if that was so, it was her fault for not telling him about it. Regardless, he needed to get back on track and her willing to help him, though that possibility seemed to become more remote every time he opened his mouth. She wasn't acting in the role of anguished widow here, but that of a cornered Intelligence overseer, so he decided to stop thinking of her as a woman and start thinking of her as a slightly less malevolent version of Mycroft. 

“You put me in the hands of an amateur, someone appointed solely to prevent me from completing my supposed mission, so that's another debt outstanding; you decided to appoint her my handler, so you have an obligation to help clear up the resulting mess.”

“You believe her murder was connected to her work as your handler?”

“The timing cannot have been a coincidence.” He paused at her ghost of a smile; she'd obviously heard Mycroft's assertions on “coincidences” a number of times already. “They could have killed her at any time; my presence seems to have been considered essential to her killer for some reason.”

She didn't respond for a few seconds and Sherlock wondered if she were giving his points some thought or was re-evaluating his current location on the MI5 kill list. Eventually he tired of waiting for her to decide what she was going to do, so he continued. “I was also wondering: did you know she was living under a false identity?”

“Who? Christina Martin or Deborah Oppenheimer?”

Sherlock paused. Damn her for dropping _that_ notion into his mind. “Oppenheimer, of course.”

“Why—” She gave a small, irritated wave. “No, I did not know. How did you find out?”

“Data, analysis, deduction. The usual.”

“Why do you think her identity is relevant?” 

_Ah, so you are lying. Excellent!_ “How could it not be relevant to her murder? Seeing as there is no physical evidence, I have to focus on motive.”

“What have you come up with so far?”

“Why should I tell you?”

“Why should I help you otherwise?” She smiled at Sherlock's obvious irritation.

Stalemate, again. If nothing else, it answered his question about whether or not she was willing to acknowledge her debts. “You don't care to know who's responsible?”

“What makes you think I don't already know who is?”

Sherlock hated it when people thought they could away with toying with him. So _dull_. “If you did, you'd never admit the possibility to me.”

“I could be bluffing.” This time, her smile was genuine. “As a matter of fact, I would very much like to know who was responsible.”

“Did you suggest to Ms Martin that she hire me?”

“No.”

“So she's not working on your behalf?”

“I believe I've already answered that question.”

He wanted to point out that one did not necessarily preclude the other, but that path led to fruitless and aimless sparring. “Was she acting on my brother's behalf?”

“I have no idea. Why don't you ask her?”

“I thought the two of you were friends?”

“Oh, we're hardly that.”

“What about Deborah Oppenheimer?”

Sherlock could see her amusement at the situation begin to bleed through her professional demeanour again and he grit his teeth and resisted the urge to storm out.

“I met the woman twice. Does that indicate a relationship of any kind?”

“You were responsible for her being assigned as my handler.”

“Again, I cannot comment on Doctor Oppenheimer's work for MI5.”

“So you admit she was working for MI5?”

“It would hardly be worthwhile to deny it at this stage.”

“Why do you think she was killed?”

“I have no idea.”

 _I doubt that very much._ “None? I think it was because someone wanted to prevent her from telling me something.”

“That's a plausible explanation.”

“I want to see the MI5 file on the investigation.”

“What investigation?”

Sherlock paused. He'd expected her to give him the usual refusal, that there was no way he was going to be given access to Intelligence files. “Which means there's been no investigation.” _Which means you know for a fact it was someone within MI5._

“Does it?” She was giving him a knowing look, but he couldn't tell if it was because she knew he'd caught her point or she suspected he hadn't. 

Then he realised: she wanted him to do her legwork for her. “That's interesting,” he eventually replied.

She gave him a tiny shrug, barely a twitch of one shoulder. “If you believe that Doctor Oppenheimer's murder is related to her association with you, I'd suggest you start there. Not that I mean to intrude on your area of expertise.” Her expression turned apologetic, but Sherlock didn't believe it for a moment.

“Well, she did make a rather heavy-handed attempt to point me in the direction of Sebastian Moran.”

“Someone I _can_ assure you did not murder Doctor Oppenheimer.” The woman's face was as if carved in stone, serene and unreadable as the statue of an ancient Egyptian goddess. Sherlock knew this was SIS code for “you're getting close to information I want you to have but can't be seen giving you”. She had to know that he understood, considering his history working with his brother. 

Best to not assume, though, he thought. “Talking to the ex-wife was a waste of time before; I can't imagine doing so again would be of any use. She's my client. If she had information relevant to—” Sherlock smirked at her. “Ah, budget reductions must really be hurting if you're desperate enough to try to piggy-back on a private investigation. Unless, of course, _you're_ the one indirectly paying for it. No wonder she told me to pad my expenses.”

Lady Smallwood barely suppressed a chortle as Sherlock continued. “You think this has something to do with the link between Moran and Moriarty that Deborah wanted me to find.”

“Why do you assume there was a link between Moran and the Moriarty organisation?”

“Because there's no other reason she would have insisted on pointing me at Moran.”

“I cannot speculate what Deborah Oppenheimer's intentions might have been. But if you believe your interpretation of her motives led you nowhere, might I suggest that you made an incorrect supposition somewhere along the line?”

Sherlock stared across the tea table at her as she glanced at her watch.

“I'm afraid I have another appointment.” She stood. “Best of luck, Sherlock.”

He stared up at her as she waited for her dismissal to have an effect. “Thank you for taking the time to see me,” he replied as he stood.

“I wish I could have been more help.”

 _So do I._ “I'm sure it will all become clear in the end.” 

_There, done. All the correct pretences present and accounted for_ , he thought as he made his token acknowledgements of the correct social procedures and departed.

Fifteen minutes later, as his cab idled in traffic, Sherlock went over the conversation, replaying the more interesting parts. It was obvious that Lady Smallwood at least was one of the higher-ups in the SIS that was tacitly supporting his efforts to get to the bottom of Doctor Deborah's murder. It was equally obvious she had a suspect, and that suspect was someone within MI5. Was it Blythe, he wondered, before dismissing it as a combination of wishful thinking and the fact that Blythe was the only person he knew at MI5 with a connection to the victim.

But why, with all the resources she had available to her, did Lady Smallwood not pursue the matter herself? The Intelligence services were hardly known for their welcoming attitude to oversight or meddling by outsiders. And then the answer came to him: she wanted a scapegoat in case the investigation fell apart or lifted rocks from things she didn't want revealed. A scapegoat she could destroy at no loss to herself or the SIS. Which also meant that her suspect was both powerful and dangerous. _Blythe, Blythe, Blythe,_ he chanted in his mind, before putting the notion aside until he had data that supported it.

Sherlock didn't much care about her motives for stepping aside and letting him get on with his investigation; he was perfectly okay with taking advantage of her complaisance and grabbing every scrap of evidence he could get his hands on. If she were lucky, in the end he might even be willing to share it with her.

He wondered if he should believe her claim that she hadn't known about Deborah's identity being a sham. She certainly had more motive to lie than Maris Featherstonhaugh had. He leant towards accepting it, though; he'd seen nothing to indicate she'd been lying, but that wasn't 100% conclusive with Intelligence types. If she had been telling the truth, he wondered who else at MI5 knew. Secrets were the underpinnings of blackmail, coercion and leverage against rivals. Perhaps someone within the agency had found out and had been using that information against Deborah. Without more data, the notion wasn't worth speculating on, but he resolved to keep the idea tucked away in the back of his mind for later re-assessment.

The more intriguing of Lady Smallwood's contributions were the references to Moran. The man was becoming a spectre haunting Sherlock's working life, as much as Moriarty once had. He and his crimes loomed over everything: his ex-wife was constantly popping up out of nowhere; the MI5 analyst responsible for investigating the Parliament bombing had held the other end of Sherlock's MI5 lead. Even the annoyingly cryptic and fruitless references to a Moriarty connection when Sherlock had least expected them. Everywhere he looked, he saw Moran's shadow; it was as if the man were Mycroft's evil twin, hovering over Sherlock's life.

But Sherlock had already disproved Moran's connection. Or had he? Sherlock supposed he shouldn't believe Big Jim's assertions about Moran. _What makes you think I'd ever work with an overbred idiot like Moran?_ meant nothing. But why would Moriarty have lied? Sherlock couldn't imagine him protecting anyone, much less Moran, who'd been nothing more than a minion from Moriarty's point of view.

Even if the elder Moriarty had been telling the truth in some twisted attempt to mislead Sherlock, it could still mean that Moran was connected to everything, just in a different way than Sherlock had originally thought. It was time to do more digging into Moran, he recognised with a sigh, preparing himself for more boring society gossip, seeing as the man himself was frustratingly unavailable. Then Sherlock wondered: why was he? He resolved to make that second on his plan of attack; on principle he resisted being led by the nose to help Lady Smallwood.

Because it was obvious that he was being led by the nose. Perhaps this was Lady Smallwood's revenge for him “failing” her. The more Sherlock thought about it, the more obvious it was that she knew exactly what was going on behind the scenes. She wanted him to find the evidence she needed to take someone down, likely using Deborah's murder as an excuse to dispose of a rival or naughty underling. She likely even knew the real reason why Deborah had taken Sherlock to meet Christina Martin that first time. He was being used, and he absolutely _hated_ it.

The case was becoming remarkably incestuous; everyone seemed to know each other. If this was the pool from which Mycroft might choose his companions, no wonder he'd decided to travel through life alone. Everywhere Sherlock looked he saw members of the same tiny cabal of friends/rivals/former lovers, all of them with knives at the ready, hidden behind polite smiles and secret handshakes and bespoke suits. 

When Sherlock strode into 221B, Mrs Hudson accosted him. “Oh, there you are. Molly was just here. She was quite anxious to see you.”

“She must not have been too anxious or she'd have called ahead to make sure I was here.”

“Oh, I don't know. She was upset about something. She wouldn't say, though.”

Sherlock rolled his eyes as he climbed the stairs. The last thing he was in the mood for was Molly prying into what had happened between him and John.

Two hours later, when Sherlock was digging through the back end of the Royal College of Psychiatrists members' web site, he received a text from Christina: _Do you have an update for me?_

The text exposed quite the gossip network; Sherlock wondered if Lady Smallwood had told Christina directly about their meeting, or had given her the information via Mycroft.

_Perhaps. SH_

_Is this code?_

_No. SH_

Just as he turned back to his computer, his phone rang. It was Molly, so he ignored it. She tried only once more before giving up, but he knew she'd pester him next time he visited Bart's.

As Sherlock whiled away the rest of the afternoon attempting a surgical strike on Doctor Deborah's professional records, the back of his mind churned away on Lady Smallwood's teases about Moran. Sherlock wondered how he might have misinterpreted Deborah's previous “clue” about the man. Why would she have wanted to bring Moran to his attention if not to aid his investigation of the broadcast hacking case? Then he asked himself: why was he assuming that it had ever been her intention to help him solve it? After all, the execution of her role as his “handler” had been a farce in every other respect; it hardly stretched the imagination to believe her intentions had nothing to do with her orders, either official or unofficial. What if she had been acting on her own behalf all along?

Picking up that thought and marrying it to his previous notion that someone in MI5 might have been using her secret to blackmail her caused a number of previously floating, unattached puzzle pieces to slot together.

Deborah's intention in bringing Moran back to Sherlock's mind had not been to cause him to think about a Moran-Moriarty connection, but about Moran and _Blythe_. And if that were true, it changed everything.

~ + ~

The next morning started off with a not-surprising turn of events.

Sherlock stared at the text from John, sent half an hour before Sherlock awoke.

_Staying at Greg's for a couple of days._

Sherlock continued to stare at his phone as his mind reeled through his possible responses, dismissing the first seven as at the very least unproductive, if not actively problematic. _Okay. SH_

He heard Mrs Hudson go out the front door, most likely for her beloved Saturday morning shopping scrum. He had no idea what he was going to do with himself, but he decided to start with confirmation of what exactly was going on with John. So he sent a text to Lestrade. _John okay? SH_

The man had obviously been expecting Sherlock's text as he replied almost immediately. _Yes. Just needs some space is all._

Sherlock didn't think that made much sense; John had a room at Baker Street and an entire unoccupied house to roam in. Why did he need Lestrade? Then he realised: sympathy. As a divorced man, Lestrade could presumably provide John with a shoulder to (metaphorically) cry on, appropriately manly support, and an adequate supply of alcohol.

Was John going to come back? That was the question Sherlock didn't want circling his thoughts all day, but he knew it wasn't going to go away until he had some indication what the answer might be. He pulled his phone out of his pocket again and stared at his contacts list, thumbs hovering.

Space. Lestrade said John needed space. “Space” implied territory not occupied by Sherlock. 

John had made it clear in their argument that Sherlock had miscalculated badly, and Sherlock recognised his mistake. The case that he'd thought would be what John wanted had been a distraction, and he'd missed all of John's clues. Sherlock had fooled himself into believing everything he'd done he'd done for John's sake, when in fact it was just avoidance because he hadn't wanted to deal with John's pain. Mycroft had been right (and wasn't that a hateful thought): Sherlock hadn't been paying attention to what mattered. And worst of all, he'd forgotten the vow he'd made to John and Mary at the wedding. John had needed him, and he'd turned away out of fear.

For the last month he'd been repeatedly failing John; the least he could do now was give him what he needed. He'd become accustomed to having his friend underfoot again, but John had left once before and Sherlock had adjusted. He could do it again, he told himself, and when John came back, Sherlock would ensure that things would be better. 

~ + ~

Sherlock adjusted the bags in his hands as he stood in the doorway of the flat. “Does your boyfriend know you're here?”

Christina looked up from her phone, pausing in her somewhat awkward texting. “Good afternoon.” She tapped her phone a few more times, then tucked it away in her handbag. “He's devastated. We'd planned an afternoon of working our way through a chapter of the Kama Sutra, but I left him in the lurch to come to see you, instead.”

Sherlock ignored her clumsy sarcasm as he looked around the flat. “Mrs Hudson left you in here alone?”

She chuckled a little. “I _know_. I was surprised, as well. Don't worry; I haven't trawled through your porn. Even if your password was ridiculously easy to guess.” She cast a loaded glance at his laptop, currently situated on the table in front of her knees.

From what Sherlock could tell, she wasn't joking, and knowing her professional skill set it was entirely possible she wasn't bluffing, either. He resisted the urge to move his computer to the desk, though he couldn't help examining it out of the corner of his eye as he hung up his coat. The laptop didn't appear to have been touched since he'd left, but that could mean nothing other than that she'd been careful.

“Why are you so obsessed with what your brother thinks of me being here?”

“Forewarned is forearmed.” Sherlock dropped into his chair. “Why are you here?”

“I wanted a status report on the investigation. I like to keep on top of things, make sure they're not drifting onto the rocks.”

“So you _are_ as overbearing as Mycroft. I have to remember to tell John he was right. I owe him a fiver.”

“I hope you weren't attempting an insult. I like Mycroft; being compared to him is hardly derogatory in my books.”

Sherlock goggled at her; after a second or two he thought she might have been teasing, but recognised that that might just be hope overriding his senses. “Or was it Lady Smallwood who sent you this time?”

“Are you always this paranoid?”

“Are you going to answer my question?”

“Do you deduce it's likely I'm going to?”

So she wanted to play this game, Sherlock thought. This one he could play all day as he had nothing else planned. “You obviously know I visited her; if you want to know what was discussed, why not just ask?”

“Because you're a Holmes and therefore congenitally incapable of providing a straight answer to a direct question.”

“Ah, so you do know Mycroft then?” he teased, hoping to lull her into a false sense of security before he pounced.

She laughed. “You're the one who brought Elizabeth up. And it's obvious why you spoke to her. Was Maris any help?”

“She was the one who directed me to Lady Smallwood. Sort of.”

“Well, yes, that was to be expected.”

“Why did you think she would?”

“I'm assuming you talked about Deborah's work for MI5; it's a logical next step, seeing as you won't ask Mycroft. Or did Maris refuse to discuss it? Did Elizabeth?”

Sherlock was getting tired of her ignoring his questions. “Some.”

“Good.”

Sherlock could tell the woman was genuinely pleased. He couldn't help thinking, though, that his investigation was turning into nothing more than him following a trail of breadcrumbs Christina had deposited in the woods to lead him to the prize she wanted him to find. 

He wondered if she was working in partnership with Lady Smallwood, or if the two women were each stringing him along in support of their own, independent, objectives. This concern led him to the question of why they were both so hesitant to bring the investigation into the light themselves. Danger, presumably. Which further supported his suspicions about Lady Smallwood's presumed suspect. In Christina's case, was she trying to divert his attention away from something she didn't want him to find?

Lady Smallwood's references to Moran had had Sherlock wondering about Christina's possible involvement in the matrix of schemes, all the way back to the second Moriarty video. Christina, Deborah, Lady Smallwood, Maris Featherstonhaugh, Mycroft. In every direction were potentially competing interests, none of them in alignment with his. He wondered if Mycroft's continuing “relationship” with Christina was a mask for his support for her objectives, or a desire to keep her somewhat under his brother's control.

Christina watched him, her usual almost-smile on, the one that tried to imply she knew what you were thinking. “Why haven't you asked your brother about Deborah?”

“Is that why you hired me? To meddle in my relationship with my brother in some misguided attempt to induce a resolution between us?”

That suggestion seemed to set her back on her heels, but was obviously a miss. “I know better than to get between you two. Though he is upset, and I don't like to see Mycroft upset. But what's going on with you two is his problem and I have enough problems of my own without taking on any of his. No, my motives are as stated, though I have to wonder why you keep questioning them.” She was smiling again and it was almost friendly; Sherlock didn't know what to make of it. “But I am curious why you weren't enough of a professional to see beyond your sniping and go to the person most likely to really know what's going on.”

“Why haven't you asked him yourself?”

She choked back a laugh. “You think he tells me anything? And no, I don't talk to your brother about you.”

“Really?” 

She shook her head, her smile widening almost imperceptibly.

Sherlock wondered what she would need to do for him to be able to trust her. Probably give up some of the secrets it had always been obvious she carried around with her. He also wondered just how much Mycroft trusted her with what he was up to, scheming away in the background. “He murdered my friend,” he muttered.

“What? You had more than one?” Sherlock wondered what his expression told her as she blurted out, “Sorry. That was tactless, even for me.” Her smile was quickly replaced by a studious blankness that Sherlock didn't like to see. 

“He didn't tell you?”

“No. That's why my reaction was 'What?' rather than 'Oh, _that_ '. Are you referring to Doctor Watson's wife?”

“Yes.”

Sherlock waited a few seconds for her protests that Mycroft would never commit such a heinous act, that Sherlock was hallucinating or paranoid, but they didn't come. Instead, she was watching him with what almost looked to be sympathy, but he didn't understand why. He also didn't understand why she hadn't leapt to Mycroft's defence; it was the kind of thing he and John did for each other. Well, _used_ to do for each other, Sherlock remembered with a sense of unease. Perhaps Christina and Mycroft's relationship really was just a sham to throw Lady Smallwood and Blythe off the scent.

“Tell me about the investigation into your husband and the Parliament bombing plot.”

“Ex-husband.” Her expression had fallen even before he'd got to the end of his sentence. “That's quite the _non sequitur_. Or do you think Mycroft murdering your friend is related?”

“No, I was thinking about—”

“Blythe.” She sighed, then her rueful smile was back. Sherlock watched her tap her finger on the arm of the sofa three times as she stared off into space over his shoulder. “His name does keep cropping up, doesn't it?”

“As does your ex-husband's. Often joined with Blythe's.”

“As yours was with Moriarty.”

“Not a very accurate analogy.”

“Oh, I beg to differ.” She shrugged. “Though I suppose I probably shouldn't.”

Sherlock knew then that she was going to give him what he wanted. Perhaps that was the reason she'd stopped by for a chat. “What do you know about Blythe?” he asked, fully cognizant that if she seemed satisfied it was because he was being a good boy and obediently following her breadcrumb trail.

“He's responsible overall for investigating the Parliament bombing plot that Mycroft and you foiled—”

“John and I, I think you'll find—”

“You and Doctor Watson, then. I apologise. Anyway, he's the head of it. It seems to have fallen by the wayside since last summer for some reason and is picking up again, most likely because there's probably going to be a change of government next month and Blythe isn't looking forward to explaining his continuing failure to the new Home Secretary.”

“Were you questioned?”

“By Blythe? Twice. He wasn't happy that I couldn't tell him anything, but that's tough nuts for him. He probably would have been less happy if I'd made things up, which I was tempted to.”

“And by who else?”

She gave him a knowing and dismissive look that was so reminiscent of Mycroft that Sherlock just barely prevented himself from laughing and pointing it out to her.

“Mycroft and I have discussed some elements of the case; he's no more able to make me tell him things I don't know than Blythe is.”

“What do you know about Moran's involvement?”

“Significantly less than Mycroft and you. And Doctor Watson, apparently. I didn't even know he'd been arrested until almost a week later.” She paused and seemed to be deciding whether or not to tell him more. “I'd known for a number of years that Sebastian was involved in a fair few dodgy things, but I didn't have even an inkling it was anything like that. I was stunned when I found out; he's always seemed much too lazy to come up with that sort of stunt. I mean, blowing up Parliament?”

“And Blythe thinks you know more?”

“Blythe is desperate to keep his job and doesn't care who suffers for him to do so.”

“Do you have any idea what has happened to Moran? He seems to have disappeared; I can't find evidence he's even been charged.”

“I can only guess. Witness protection, maybe? But you're right; he has disappeared. Even my daughter hasn't heard from him since June, and she was always the person in the family he was closest to. And what happened—” She paused again and Sherlock bit back his question. “It's obvious Sebastian's made some sort of deal with MI5. Or MI6. Or someone, and they disappeared him somewhere. He's probably laying on a beach in Fiji or Samoa as we speak, with a nice fat Swiss bank account courtesy of British taxpayers, because he hasn't touched his accounts.”

“Which you control.”

“Yes. And I'll probably never be able to get him declared dead, so that leaves the estate in limbo for who knows how long—”

“Is that the real reason you hired me: to find your ex-husband?”

She sighed. “Mycroft was right; you really don't pay attention when other people are talking. And no. Not that I'm not curious, but for the eleventh time, I really did just hire you to find out who killed Deborah. How are things going with that?”

“It's a pity our victim's widow appears to have no interest in the question.” Sherlock wondered what Maris Featherstonhaugh, cousin of Sebastian Moran, thought of his shenanigans.

“Well, she was Deborah's partner for more than thirty years. Birds of a feather and all that. And reading between the lines, I think she has her own suspicions and that it's someone she thinks it would be unhealthy to develop an interest in.” 

More leading-by-the-nose, Sherlock noted, though Christina's lead accorded with his own opinions. He was tired of being driven, like a bird to the gun, by these women. Out of the corner of his eye he observed Christina watching him, checking to see if he was going to continue being a good boy. He wanted to rebel on principle, but knew he had to bide his time. “We're done then?” he stood without waiting for her to answer.

Christina looked up to him, not moving for three heartbeats, then rose slowly. “Yes, well, I suppose I should let you have the rest of your day. Thank you.” She pulled her coat on, and as Sherlock grabbed his laptop and sat at his desk she stopped in the doorway for a moment to give him a brief smile and a wave, neither of which he acknowledged, then she left.

Everything seemed to be pointing at Blythe. Every _one_ seemed to be pointing at Blythe, and Sherlock's inbred contrariness caused him to wonder why so many people who were at odds on so many other points all seemed to agree on this one. Mycroft's motives he could understand. Lady Smallwood's motives he couldn't know; most likely they were related to Mycroft's: some sort of excruciatingly polite chess match/civil war within the SIS. Perhaps Blythe had cocked an eyebrow inappropriately during a meeting and so had to die.

And it was certain that at least half of Christina's motives were driven by Mycroft, regardless of her protestations. Was she using Sherlock as a weapon in some sort of personal way, as Mycroft and Blythe had been doing? And if so, against whom? If everyone were trying to send him after Blythe, there was just as great a chance the man was innocent as he was guilty, all things considered.

But Sherlock had nothing else to go on. He knew he couldn't let his disquiet with the circumstances or his disdain for following (even implied) orders colour his decisions. So he resolved to be a grown-up and do his job, and keep his eyes open for even a hint of contrary evidence, or a clue about why everyone might be pushing him in the same direction.

For the rest of that day and evening, and all through the next, Sherlock chased information about Sir Edwin Blythe. While information was easier to find than he expected for someone who worked for MI5, his official position was reasonably prominent, but the information was hardly fulsome. So Sherlock expanded the scope of his search to the people around Blythe.

Everything he found indicated that Blythe's family was just as boring as any other group of inbred Establishment types: wife distantly related to a cousin of the Queen, son at Eton, daughter at Cambridge on the search for a future peer to marry. A small estate in Kent. Boring, boring, boring. On the surface.

Early on Monday morning, Sherlock noticed that in almost every non-family photo he found of Blythe, he was accompanied by a man he eventually discovered was named Richard Pollay. Reading between the lines, it was obvious that Pollay was also affiliated in some way with MI5. And when Sherlock turned his attention to Pollay, he found himself a thread he could possibly follow into Blythe's world.

While Sherlock found even less about Pollay on-line than he did about Blythe, he found a veritable treasure trove on Pollay's wife. She served on the Boards of half a dozen society-riddled charities (two of them with the wife of Harry the Equerry, Sherlock noted). And as luck would have it, one of those charities was holding a fundraiser in two days.

As Sherlock pondered the utility of using Pollay's wife to get to Pollay and thence to Blythe, he looked up to see John sitting on the sofa, nursing a cup of tea. Sherlock blinked twice, wondering if he was seeing a flashback or a hallucination.

“You're not hallucinating,” the hallucination said in greeting.

“How do you feel about blagging our way into a charity gala on Wednesday evening?”

“Okay, sure,” “John” replied with a rueful half-grin. Sherlock could tell he wanted to smile but was forcing himself not to.

“We'll have to get you kitted out today. Er, tomorrow,” he added, glancing at the clock.

“All right.”

Sherlock turned back to the computer. He wanted to ask the hallucination if he were really there, but refrained on the off-chance that it really was John. If it were, the question would be more of an admission than Sherlock was willing to make.

Then the hallucination stood, walked over, and pinched Sherlock's earlobe.

“Ow!”

“Couldn't do that if I were in your mind palace.”

“You'd be surprised at the things you've got up to in my mind palace.”

John gave him a startled look, then chuckled and ambled off to the kitchen and began opening cupboards in his usual scavenging ritual. Sherlock felt himself relax for the first time in days. John was back, and Sherlock had to make sure he didn't screw things up again, because he had the sneaking suspicion that he might just be on his last chance, despite his friend's apparent good humour.

“You working on the murder case?” John abandoned his search for dinner and returned to the sofa and his tea. Sherlock could tell John wanted to talk, but it was equally obvious that he was avoiding what they probably should talk about.

“Yep.” Sherlock scanned the result of his most recent search, avoiding John's eye.

“How's that going?”

“Going. Ish.” Sherlock was glad to see that John was being practical. Their working relationship returning to the relative simplicity of Detective + Sidekick was probably for the best, at least in the short term. Sherlock wondered if he should apologise for being a heartless bastard, then noted to himself that if John had a problem with that fact their friendship would have ended a long time ago. John was there for the chase, not tea and sympathy, so the chase was what Sherlock was going to give him.

“Our client came by yesterday.”

“ _Our_ client?”

“Yes, _our_ client.”

John snorted. “Okay. Why?”

“For an update after my almost helpful meetings with Lady Smallwood and the widow. And if you think Christina Martin is like Mycroft, Maris Featherstonhaugh would have been a revelation. By comparison, Christina's Jo Brand.”

Now John let free rein to a hearty guffaw, likely his first since before the accident. “So it was a meeting of the poshos. Glad I missed it.” Sherlock glared at him. “What was she like? Other than being Mycroft's long-lost twin.”

“Strangely uninterested in finding out who killed her wife.”

“Maybe she did it.”

“Yes, the evening of the shooting I did wonder for a minute or two if it had been her purchasing a cheap divorce. But I discounted the possibility. There was nothing in Deborah's behaviour or evidenced in the house to indicate there were problems in the marriage.”

“In the house? How would—oh, never mind.”

Sherlock was surprised by the dismissal; John usually enjoyed hearing his deductions. “There do seem to be a number of possible competing agendas around this case.”

“No? Really?”

Sherlock ignored John's sarcasm which, in turn, caused the man's sarcasm to elide into his more usual chagrin. “For example, the former Lady Moran. Regardless of her protests, she has to have a goal other than simply finding out who murdered the wife of her ex-husband's cousin, friend or no.”

“Why? Maybe she really was telling the truth. Some people do, you know.”

“If she were in the habit of being honest, how could she possibly be friends with Mycroft? He'd be bored rigid within five minutes in her company.”

“Maybe she's making an exception for you. Women seem to do that a lot.” Sherlock opened his mouth to protest, but John cut him off. “And don't argue; you know you take advantage of that whenever you can.”

“I can't be blamed for other people's stupidity or fondness for being deceived.”

“No, of course not.” Now it was obvious John was teasing, which flattened Sherlock's hackles.

“I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on our client. What her true motives might be. Assuming she isn't telling the truth,” he added at John's pointed look.

“Uh huh.” John shifted in his seat and looked away, constructing his answer. “Well, as you have't really told me anything about her, this is only first impressions.” He paused and blew out a deep breath, oblivious to Sherlock's growing impatience with his stalling. “She's got money but wasn't born with it. She married Moran, which is odd. People like Moran don't marry down unless it's for money, or unless the woman's really gorgeous, like a model or something, and she's nowhere near that good-looking. So, why did Moran marry her? And why did she want to marry him? She seems pretty smart and doesn't seem like a snob, so I can't see the title attracting her.”

Sherlock watched John fall into the pleasures of a good stream-of-consciousness ramble. As John continued, Sherlock watched him relax, leaning back into the sofa, hands folded across his stomach. It could be a scene from almost any time in their friendship before the fall and Sherlock's disappearance. The realisation wasn't as satisfying as Sherlock would have expected, likely because a lot of his assumptions about their friendship has been called into question in the last few weeks and Sherlock still had not yet decided how he was going to respond.

“Are you even paying attention?” John asked two minutes in.

“Of course. You think there's something not quite right about the Moran marriage and subsequent divorce, think Mycroft has some unknown connection, and wondered about whether or not she left Moran because either: a) she was involved in his treasons, knew he was about to be caught, and didn't want to be trapped in the net building around him; b) she wasn't involved, and found out about them and got out before he was caught; or c) she was an agent working for Mycroft assigned to get close to Moran and withdrew from the mission as it neared its end. Is that a fair summary?”

“Yeah, okay. Whatever.” John had his rueful smile back on, so Sherlock knew he'd taken his comeuppance about as well as he usually did. “What do you think's really going on with her and Mycroft?” John asked.

“Lord, I have _no_ idea. Nor do I want to know.”

“Well, we know they're not—you know. She's not exactly powerful, so there's no draw there, assuming you were right before.”

Sherlock grimaced. “I'm always right about Mycroft. Especially about his—deviances.”

John gave him a sideways look that Sherlock couldn't interpret.

“What was that for?”

“Nothing. Just—yeah. It's good to be back in the game, I guess.”

“Let's wait until we crash Mrs Pollay's charity do in a few days. Hopefully Lestrade will be on duty that night.”

“Why? And I don't think Chief Inspectors work the night shift.”

“So he can drop the charges if we get caught.”

John smiled and the sight gladdened Sherlock to a ridiculous degree. “Of course.”

He didn't understand why John was back. After everything they'd said, Sherlock didn't know why he'd been forgiven. If it had been anyone other than John (or perhaps Molly. Or Lestrade. Or Mrs Hudson) he'd assume there was some sort of strategy in play. But John's lack of guile was one of his most notable and appreciated qualities, so Sherlock doubted that was the case.

Was it really going to be this easy? Was John going to let him off the hook without Sherlock making a proper show of remorse?

As he returned to his research on Pollay and his connections to Blythe, Sherlock pondered what John's plan might be, and why he'd changed his mind and come back. Perhaps Lestrade reminded John that if he were coming to Sherlock to have his emotional needs met, he should have expected the well to be dry. Sherlock was confused, and he hated being confused. But he recognised that this was going to be the norm for a while, and as long as John gave him a chance, he was remarkably okay with confusion as the price he paid for it.

~ + ~


	5. That's the way it's always worked in the past

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock acquires the final piece of the puzzle, resists a potentially self-destructive temptation, and comes to a decision.

“Stop tugging it; you'll ruin the line.” Sherlock glanced at John squirming in his new suit.

“It's bloody uncomfortable. Hate wearing suits.”

“Just think of it as a form of parade dress. With less shouting.”

Sherlock could tell that instruction had made an impression, as the man immediately ceased fiddling with his sleeves. John was, though, still looking around them at the crowd of City types and society housewives. “Why am I here,” he muttered at the edge of Sherlock's hearing, more an invocation than a question.

“Because it's time you shared some of the pain associated with this case.” 

An officious young man approached; with a single fluid uncoiling of his arm, Sherlock pulled their tickets out of his pocket and dropped them into the man's hands as he swept past, without so much as acknowledging his existence. He felt John follow him into the room. Once they'd arrived, Sherlock slowly turned, taking in the crowd clustered in three locations on the perimeter of the too-large venue: at the bar, around someone he couldn't see, and with a blonde fifty-ish woman standing next to a man Sherlock immediately recognised from their memorable trip to the Palace. Sherlock felt strangely exposed, standing in the centre of the room with John.

“Of all the places you've dragged me on cases, this has to be the weirdest,” John mused as he mirrored Sherlock's examination of the ballroom and its occupants.

“Please resist the urge to lob a grenade into the middle of them.”

“I'll try, but no promises.”

They shared a chuckle and Sherlock felt his synapses firing at the prospect of the hunt ahead of them. “Stop staring, John.”

“Why? It's like a visit to the people zoo. 'Ooo, look over at that cage, children. Some lovely specimens of inbred half-wits. Purebred Harrovians for fifteen generations and not five brain cells between them',” John intoned quietly and Sherlock suppressed a laugh.

“And you wonder why I didn't bring you to meet the widow.”

“Where did you get the tickets for this, anyway? I thought you said it was sold out.”

“Our client. Ah, one of our hosts,” Sherlock added as a tiny, bejewelled woman homed in on them like a well-trained hunting dog.

“I think that one'd probably prefer 'hostess',” John countered just before the woman breached the perimeter of hearing range.

“Mr Holmes!” she exclaimed as she thrust out her right hand; Sherlock took a step back from her charge into his personal space before forcing himself to play nice and stopped. Heads turned at both her words and her tone. Sherlock could tell from a few of the startled then disappointed expressions once they saw it was him, that people thought she was greeting Mycroft. “And Doctor Watson! Felicity Pollay; how lovely to see both of you. I don't remember seeing your names—” 

“Christina Martin was kind enough to acquire tickets for us,” Sherlock explained as he made a tactical concession to manners and shook the woman's child-sized, flesh-less hand. It felt like clutching a bundle of broken chopsticks.

Her greeting dropped a few degrees of warmth into rigidly polite. “Yes, Christina is a friend of the Abernathys.” She glanced over to Harry the Equerry and his wife. The look that passed between the two women could have flash-frozen a minor inland sea. “Well, I hope you enjoy yourselves. The silent auction tables are in front of the stage, and I see from your friend you've already found the bar.”

Sherlock turned and saw John approaching, a glass in each hand. He hadn't even noticed the man leave. Sherlock wondered if he should worry about missing time all of a sudden. When he turned back to Mrs Pollay, she'd already clip-clopped her way across the room to greet more arrivals.

“How did you manage to get those so quickly? You can't have been away more than ten seconds.”

“I was gone about two minutes. Most of which I watched you staring into space ignoring that poor woman.”

Sherlock glared at John for a moment, then shrugged. “Actually, I have an idea.” Paying no heed to the glass John was holding out for him, Sherlock made a beeline for Mycroft's “old friend”.

“Mr Holmes,” the man said as Sherlock approached. The wife appeared slightly stricken, before she hid it under a smile suddenly attached like a clip-on bow tie.

“Sherlock, please. We're hardly strangers.”

Harry Abernathy chuckled, as did John. “No, of course not.” He turned to John. “Doctor Watson.” 

“Hello,” John replied, looking like he refrained from a sarcastic salute only because both his hands were still occupied.

“May I introduce my wife, Suzanne.” Harry turned to her and Sherlock was surprised by the genuine affection on his face when he spoke to her. “Sherlock Holmes and Doctor John Watson.”

“Mycroft's brother. You solve puzzles for the Met. Our daughter is such a fan.” Above her token smile, her eyes were engaged in a flinty assessment of Sherlock's clothes, haircut and suitability as a marriage candidate for any of her unmarried female relatives. It was obvious he failed on all counts, to his inestimable relief.

Sherlock had no use for her, so ignored her and addressed himself to Harry. “So, how's your employer? Kicked any of her deadly habits yet?” He heard John make a tiny choking sound behind him; he'd obviously unwittingly caught him drinking. Harry appeared entirely unfazed, taking the question as Sherlock had intended: not at all seriously. He was surprised that anyone Mycroft had ever referred to as a friend had a sense of humour. But then, being a friend of Mycroft's must entail at the very least a well-developed sense of the absurd, he reasoned.

Now that he'd set things in motion, though, Sherlock was tongue-tied. He had no reason to talk to the man other than for appearance's sake, and he hated chit-chat. Thankfully, John proved his worth again by asking the man something mundane and appropriate, so Sherlock could focus on the growing crowd. The division in the attendees was becoming more noticeable now that most guests had drinks and the line in front of the bar had thinned out. After a minute or so, Sherlock turned his attention back to the wife, who was watching him.

“I'm having difficulty seeing any resemblance between you and your brother,” she said in tones that she'd obviously meant to seem flirtatious, but in reality sounded ominous.

“One of us had to get the looks,” Sherlock replied off-handedly, employing his usual response to the surprisingly large number of people who made that comment.

“I was thinking more the difference in manner.”

While Sherlock knew she'd said “manner”, he couldn't help but think she'd really meant “manners” and gave her a curious look. People of their ilk were rarely so obviously rude; then he noticed the slight glassiness in her eyes and just wrote off her attitude to the alcohol.

“Well, it was lovely chatting. Best to mingle,” he addressed to no one in particular. Without waiting for John, Sherlock turned on his heel and headed off.

“Do you actually want this?” John asked once he'd caught up, brandishing the glass in his left hand.

“Nope.”

“Okay.” John deposited his own empty glass on the tray of a passing waiter. “There. Feel less like a lush now.”

“I don't know why. Considering the crowd, I imagine two-fisted drinking will be the norm here soon enough. You're just ahead of the curve.” Sherlock changed direction and headed for the group clustered around Felicity Pollay in the hope of finding her husband nearby.

As they approached, from the back of the crowd around his wife, Richard Pollay watched them, an expression on his face that said he was steeling himself for an unavoidable and unpleasant ordeal. For a moment, Sherlock knew what it was to be Mycroft, feared by everyone, and he barely suppressed a smirk at Pollay's obvious discomfort. Sherlock also sensed John's confusion at why they were hopping from group to group with no apparent purpose, but the midst of the game was hardly the time or place to be explaining strategy.

“Mr Pollay.” Sherlock stuck his hand out as he approached, putting on his least-threatening smile, kept in reserve for necessary idiots.

“Yes, Richard. Mycroft's brother and his friend are here. Christina Martin was able to get tickets for them. Wasn't that kind of her?” Felicity popped up and interjected before her husband could respond. Sherlock wondered if all married couples performed this strange dance in public of speaking for each other, unbidden.

“Of course,” Pollay replied to his wife, before turning to Sherlock and John. “Wonderful to meet you.” The man's handshake was performed with an exact calculation of being as brief as possible without being exactly insulting. Sherlock could see the man's pupils dilate; it wasn't attraction or alcohol, so he attributed it to anxiety. And as soon as Sherlock recognised that, he knew Pollay thought he was attending on Mycroft's behalf. As he and Pollay took their measure of each other, each waiting for the other to make some sort of move, John did a fair job of pretending to not hate being there to Mrs Pollay, who either was dim or hopeful enough to believe him.

“So, how's Mycroft?” Pollay asked in a misguided effort to break the ice.

“No idea. I'm sure you've seen him more recently than I have,” Sherlock replied, knowing he had to convince the man to suspect Sherlock might not be working for Mycroft, without losing the leverage associated with the belief that he very well might be. And the statement had the useful defensibility of being 100% true. “I was hoping we might have the chance to talk. Not here, of course. A matter relating to a case.” Sherlock held Pollay's eye for a moment to ensure he was paying attention, then directed his gaze pointedly across the room to Harry Abernathy. Pollay caught the intended allusion immediately, and Sherlock was glad to see it have the effect he'd hoped for. Pollay's wariness slipped away, replaced by a solicitude that was going to end up bordering on obsequiousness if Sherlock wasn't careful. Even John noticed, judging by his sudden expression of amusement.

“I'd be happy to help, of course.” Pollay glanced across the room again, and Sherlock wondered if he'd perhaps gone too far. Hopefully Pollay wouldn't become a nuisance once his usefulness was done.

“Excellent. Shall we say tomorrow?”

Pollay looked startled, but recovered quickly. “I'm afraid I'm not available until Monday.”

“It is a matter of some urgency.”

Pollay appeared to be in the throes of a considerable dilemma, wanting to toady up to someone working for the Royal family, without alienating whoever ordinarily owned his time. “We could meet Saturday. I'll let you know tomorrow or Friday morning; I'll need to confirm our schedule.” He glanced at his wife, currently boring John with likely exaggerated tales of their son's career in the Marines. “We could meet for dinner at my club.”

“You don't belong to Mycroft's club for recreational mutes, do you?”

Pollay chuckled. “No—”

“Because we need to speak somewhere _secure_.”

“Secure.” Pollay sounded disheartened. Apparently, Sherlock had thrown a spanner into his weekend plans. “I, um. I'll give the matter some thought.”

“Fine.” Sherlock turned and took two steps before remembering he'd left something behind. “John,” he called over his shoulder before striding across the room and out the door.

In the cab, John turned to him. “Did you get what you wanted?”

“I usually do, in the end.”

John chuckled. “So what was that all about, anyway?”

“I needed Pollay to be willing to speak with me; I need to ask him penetrating questions about a colleague. Pollay is unimaginative enough to believe that because Mycroft and I are brothers I'm working for him. And because it appears Mycroft is at war with Pollay's MI5 overlord, I suspected he would be loath to do what I want. So I caused him to believe I'm actually working on a case for Mycroft's chum who spends his days chasing the Queen with a cigarette lighter.”

“Uh huh. I thought it might be something like that.”

“Thank you for keeping the wife occupied, by the way. And for adequately hiding the fact you despise all of them.”

“No problem. And stop projecting.”

Sherlock turned to John's smirk. “Pop psychology. What next? Agreeing to investigate Doctor Deborah's murder does not mean I welcome psychoanalysis back into my life. I got enough of that in rehab,” he added, trailing off as the cab turned into Baker Street.

“What—really?”

“Yes, really. I propose the following image for your amusement: me in group therapy sessions with third rate pop singers, footballers, and the idle spawn of the nouveau bourgeois.” Sherlock left that thought with John as he stepped out onto the pavement. As he reached the door of 221b, he heard an explosion of laughter behind him, and Sherlock smiled into the collar of his coat, relief making him almost giddy.

~ + ~

While he was satisfied with the result of his efforts with Pollay, Sherlock wasn’t thrilled with having to wait until the weekend to speak with the man in private. To a certain degree, he could understand the man's paranoia; Mycroft was still re-bugging Baker Street on a regular basis, and who knew what might be going on at Pollay’s home, office and club.

To pass the time, Sherlock decided to open the door of Baker Street to passing trade, something he hadn’t done since before Christmas. As much as anything, he wanted to keep John occupied and (if possible) amused while they waited for the next step in the murder investigation. And the public didn’t disappoint. 

Between a borderline-hysterical banker “losing” his fiancée’s engagement ring (attempted insurance fraud) and an Oxford don suspecting a student of stealing an exam for a prestigious scholarship (the son of a secretly now-penniless property magnate with cocaine and gambling addictions), Sherlock managed to keep John and himself entertained for a day.

Friday, however, didn’t provide similar diversions. John blamed the rain for keeping away the punters, but Sherlock suspected an intervention closer to home. 

After a ten-minute argument about whether or not Sherlock had already told John the story, Sherlock filled the afternoon by regaling his roommate with the story of his first significant case as a consulting detective. It was still one of Sherlock’s favourites: an ancient riddle, mathematics, and a sterling example of avarice and human folly, all rolled into one. The solution had been obvious once one paid attention to the clues, and at the time the case had convinced Sherlock that his chosen career path had been the correct one. 

As the afternoon wound down and the shadows lengthened across the sitting room, John's mood became pensive and Sherlock knew that he wasn't going to be able to dodge The Talk any longer. But there was no way he was bringing it up; John was going to have to take the lead if this was how he wanted to spend the evening.

“I had an interesting conversation with Greg while I was at his place,” John started.

It was a decent opening, Sherlock thought. Referencing Lestrade, knowing he was one of the few people in the world whose opinion Sherlock had any time for, was a good strategy. He gave John a mental point for having come up with a plan beforehand instead of just blundering in as he usually did.

“Oh?” Sherlock didn't look up from his computer.

“About Mary.”

“Yes.”

“We should talk.” Sherlock could tell from John's slightly choked-down tones that he was forcing himself to get the words out, that he didn't actually _want_ to talk about Mary, but felt some compulsion to do so. “About—look, I don't want another fight—” 

“Good.” Sherlock paused and finally looked over to him. “Why do you want to talk? You didn't before when I offered.”

John sighed and rubbed his eyes, then scrubbed his fingers through his hair. “Do you care at all? About what happened.”

Sherlock paused, unsure exactly what event John was referring to and not happy that he was ignoring Sherlock's question.

“Did you care about Mary?” John clarified pointedly.

“Of course I did. You _know_ I did. She was my friend, not just your wife. She—”

“Good. Okay—”

“But I can't see why you expected me to care about Grace.” Sherlock held up a hand to hold off John's protest. “I'm not saying I wouldn't have, eventually. But young children hold _no_ interest for me. I can't understand why you expected me to care for her the way you did.”

“Oh, so now you're acknowledging that I actually cared for my child, because before you claimed I didn't actually want her because you know what's going on in my mind better—”

“Do you really want a repeat of last week?” Sherlock interrupted, as John's voice began to climb the decibel scale.

They stared across the room at each other for a few seconds, then John huffed and settled back into the sofa cushions and made a “go on” gesture.

“I'm sorry I upset you—no, really, I am—and I should have kept my opinions to myself on that score.”

For the first few seconds after Sherlock paused, it was obvious that John was expecting more. Sherlock gave him a questioning look. John sighed and crossed his arms, turning his gaze to the window.

“So that's it, is it? You think if you apologise I'll just forget it all.”

“Well, that's the way it's always worked in the past.”

“So that's it?”

“What else do you want from me, John?”

The man seemed to give the question serious consideration, which struck Sherlock as strange. What had John been wasting the last few days doing if not figuring out what he wanted? Had he spent his entire time at Lestrade's in a drunken stupor?

“I want you to admit you were jealous of Grace.”

Sherlock started, annoyed that John was still harping on the issue. “But that would be a lie. I was no more jealous of your child than you were of Doctor Oppenheimer.”

“I never met Doctor Oppenheimer.”

“Exactly. But you still think you have the right to govern my feelings about her and her death.”

John frowned and Sherlock forced a neutral expression on his face.

“Huh. That's—actually a good point.” Sherlock smiled and John's frown was replaced by a thoughtful expression again. “Who'd have thought it.”

“Not you, obviously,” Sherlock drawled.

“Let's not get ahead of ourselves.”

Sherlock threw up his hands. “Honestly, John, we've both behaved like idiots and we've both apologised. I fail to see what else there is to discuss, unless you want to initiate another round of Victim Olympics. If so, I'd have no alternative but to throw you out.”

John didn't answer for a few seconds and when he did his tones were rueful, not angry. “We both know I'd win that game.”

Sherlock glanced across the room. “Yes, you would.”

~ + ~

Later that afternoon, just as Sherlock began to suspect he might have to hunt down Pollay again, a courier brought a note. Pollay wanted to meet in Oxford on Saturday. Now that he had confirmation, Sherlock couldn’t help being a bit miffed at having to drag himself all the way to Oxford, with only a moderate prospect of success. Their rendezvous spot, a pub which the internet told him was on the northern edge of the town centre, was probably chosen to give them a large, noisy crowd to immerse themselves in. 

When he told John of the plans, the man just shrugged; Sherlock was glad to see that his pre-baby insouciance towards danger and the security services had returned, just in time for another tangle with MI5. 

“Don’t bring your gun,” Sherlock said as he blowtorched the note from Pollay.

John looked up from the newspaper. “What?”

“Guns make Intelligence types twitchy, especially the desk-bound ones.” Sherlock could tell that that statement had sent John into a reverie, likely imagining what Mycroft’s response to the potential of adjacent gunfire might be. “We have no idea who he might decide to bring along and fire fights tend to put a damper on proceedings.” 

Sherlock wondered if he should draft Constable Amy into their plan. If nothing else, she could pre-scout the location to see if there were any suspiciously broad-shouldered men hanging around the place before they went in. It would be good to know exactly what they were walking into. In the end, he decided he wasn’t sure just how trustworthy Constable Amy was. Then he made a mental note to remind Lestrade about Sherlock’s previous suggestion to get her transferred to the Met. 

The trip to Oxford on Saturday was uneventful. Sherlock wondered if their MI5 tail was more competent than average, he was losing his nose for surveillance, or Pollay had refrained from telling his boss that he would be meeting Sherlock and John that afternoon. For some reason, the idea of their _not_ being followed made him a little anxious.

The pub was as Sherlock had expected: noisy, crowded with students and more than a few older locals; he and John shared a look that said, “Good choice,” and made their way through the crowd to the table along the back wall, where Pollay waited for them, alone.

As they approached, Sherlock sent John to the bar for drinks. Once he'd joined Pollay, Sherlock was glad to see that the man wasn't interested in time-wasting niceties; he obviously wanted out of there as soon as possible.

“So. Moran,” Sherlock began. Pollay started at the name and didn't answer. “What exactly is the status of that investigation?”

Pollay seemed to have recovered and hitched onto his face a purposefully bland expression Sherlock knew well from Mycroft. And from Blythe and Christina Martin, now he thought of it. “And how does Harry's case involve Moran?” Pollay eventually responded. 

“I can't see that's any of your concern. Perhaps you can at least answer why he hasn't been charged with the crime we caught him red-handed attempting. Is MI5 not bothering with prosecuting people anymore? Is it now just three bullets to the back of the head and a shallow grave in the forest somewhere?”

“You watch too many Hollywood spy films.”

“No, that's the voice of experience. So you're saying he's still alive? And let's take it as read, shall we, that you're going to reply 'I said nothing of the kind' and we can skip the tiresome back and forth about who said what about whom.”

John joined them, plopping a glass in front of Sherlock, which he ignored.

“Does your brother know you're here?” Pollay asked, pursuing one of Sherlock's least favourite subjects.

“Oh, I'm sure his people have noted it for his daily report. But I'm not working for him, if that's what you're really asking.” Sherlock paused to allow Pollay to absorb that statement. “Of course, the real question is what your chum Blythe did to make Moran disappear eight months ago.”

Other than blinking twice, Pollay didn't react. Sherlock couldn't help comparing the man's easily readable discomfiture with what Mycroft's reaction to such a statement would have been. Was MI5 so slovenly in training all its people? It was apparent that Sherlock's shot in the dark regarding Blythe had hit some sort of target. He allowed Pollay to trundle along to the end of his rickety thought processes uninterrupted.

The man sighed; apparently his mental train had finally reached the station. “Why does the former Lady Moran care about what happened to him? She initiated the divorce proceedings.”

Sherlock couldn't decide if the man was obtuse, working with inadequate data, or more cunning than he appeared. However, he had inadvertently told Sherlock that even if he weren't under MI5 surveillance, Christina was. Not surprising, considering that Blythe likely thought both of them were allies of Mycroft's.

“To the best of my knowledge, the former Lady Moran couldn't care less about the location of her ex-husband other than wishing him a place in one of the lower regions of Hell, and the ability to prove he's there.”

Pollay's look became owlish and Sherlock knew the man's next question would be telling. Then a faint smile appeared on Pollay's face, and Sherlock knew he'd made up his mind about something. “To be entirely honest, I'm not privy to all the intricacies of the Moran case. I imagine much of the reasoning behind our strategy is being re-thought as we speak.”

 _Ah, politics. I wondered when you'd rear your head._ “Yes, I imagine the coming election is sharpening people's attention.”

Pollay glanced to John and Sherlock knew he was wondering just how much trouble he would get into if anyone found out they were discussing these matters in front of someone who, officially, didn't have the security clearance to hear it. “John has been cleared to—”

“Really?” Pollay's disbelief bordered on disdain. “When? And by whom?”

“I can leave if it's a problem.” John began to stand; Sherlock clasped his shoulder and pushed him back into his chair. 

“Do you actually think you're not taking a risk talking to _me_? Especially considering who we both know we have to talk about?” Sherlock asked Pollay.

“How—admirably blunt of you,” Pollay replied, now almost amused.

“Well, the man has always been responsible for the Moran case; his name had to come up eventually.”

“How does it concern you?”

“For the case—”

“What do you want to know?” 

“Everything about him. Anything.”

“That would be quite a tale, and I don't have the time. You'll need to be more specific.”

“About the Moran case, then. I can imagine the political ramifications have made the investigation challenging.”

“Yes, well. Beyond the political implications it's been a mess from the very beginning, even before the arrest. Which is surprising; Blythe's ordinarily an excellent case manager. But it's been a shoddy piece of work all along. Poorly organised. The interviews, in particular, were a disaster. Useless, most of them.”

“And there's been no oversight? Who was he reporting to?”

“The Director, of course. The Home Secretary. The Cabinet Office, as usual has been sticking their fingers in everything. In the early stages no one seemed to care much about the fact it never went anywhere. We've always known that no one in the government had the stomach to prosecute, so I imagine Blythe couldn't be bothered to put in the effort to make a half-decent job of it.”

Pollay was hitting his stride and seemed to be venting long-suppressed frustrations. Sherlock sat back and let the man get on with it, now that the floodgates had opened. He passed the time by speculating on how Mycroft managed to work with spineless idiots like this day-in, day-out without succumbing to the urge to blow his brains out. Goldfish was practically a compliment.

“When did MI5 first learn of the plot?”

“In late August. There was some discussion of what our response would be.”

“Until my brother decided to chase me down in Serbia and drag me home to deal with it because none of you wanted to deal with the political fallout.”

“Oh, no, that was Blythe’s idea.”

 _What?_ “So Mycroft’s been trying to take credit for someone else’s work again?” Sherlock hoped the insult would steer Pollay down the wrong track while Sherlock pondered the implications of Blythe being behind Sherlock’s recall to England.

They shared a brief chuckle that indicated Pollay had taken the statement at face value, while Sherlock wondered why Blythe would want Sherlock available to help Mycroft in their perpetual low-level warfare.

“Funny thing is, Mycroft fought the suggestion.”

“Probably solely on principle, if it was Blythe’s idea.”

“I don’t think he knew it originated with Blythe. Lady Smallwood brought it to the strategy meeting, and she never mentioned where it came from. Mycroft might have suspected, but—” Pollay shrugged. “He obviously had reasons of his own, and he never shared them with me.”

Sherlock watched the man watch for his reaction as his mind flipped through possible reasons why Mycroft might oppose it.

“Who else was involved in the Moran investigation?”

Pollay choked back a laugh. “You can’t really expect me to tell you that.” 

“Why not? You told me about Blythe.” At Pollay’s obvious discomfort, Sherlock added, “Ah, you’re offended that Moran got off scot free and you want me to help you right a wrong.”

“Not exactly—” 

“And you want Blythe to pay for running an incompetent investigation that you blame for stalling your career—” Sherlock held up a hand to hold off the man’s protests. “I have no interest in internal MI5 politics. But my client _is_ interested in why there’s been no movement on the case.”

Pollay looked as though he wanted to just shrug again. “Yes, I imagine your brother does. He’s been meddling from the sidelines from the beginning.”

“What makes you think I care about what Mycroft wants?” Sherlock ensured he injected adequate disdain into the sniff that followed. He felt John watching him intently, and Sherlock hoped the man would stop soon or he was going to give the game away. “So that’s it? That’s all you can tell me about the investigation, that it was a disaster from the start?”

Pollay consulted his watch. “You have about two minutes until my wife appears and starts asking questions about why you’re here. I’d suggest you make them count.”

“Okay, you don’t want to talk about Moran other than to try and make Blythe the fall guy. How about Deborah Oppenheimer’s murder?”

The non sequitur startled Pollay. “What about it? And why do you care?”

“She was my handler. She was—not boring.” Sherlock shammed discomfort at the question, as if it were a painful emotional concern. “I can’t imagine why anyone would want to assassinate someone so harmless.”

“I’m afraid I know nothing about it.”

Sherlock could tell he was lying; for an Intelligence agent he possessed barely more skill at dissimulation than John. “So the investigation didn’t reveal anything? She was working for your lot and no one seems to have had any concern about it whatsoever. It makes a person think, I can assure you.”

“I can’t speak for the agency as a whole, but I was rather taken up with other things at the time.”

“What? Particularly tricky crossword puzzle? Meeting of the Parliamentary Wine Tasting Committee? Or was it sucking up to Harry Abernathy in some fruitless attempt to get your son a job?”

Sherlock knew he’d hit a nerve. 

“I can’t believe Mycroft—”

“What makes you think my brother and I would ever discuss _you_? No, you were practically screaming your desperation on Wednesday night. You might want to take a look at doing something about that. You have more tells than a Katie Price book.” Sherlock made a vague wave, as if to brush Pollay’s consternation out of his field of reference.

Sherlock could sense from the sudden stiffening of John’s spine that he might just have shot himself in the foot.

“If you want to know what’s going on, why not talk to your brother? Not that he’s been involved other than to rile people up, point fingers and make frankly ludicrous accusations against—”

To Sherlock's consternation, Pollay's survival instincts caught up to his mouth and slammed it shut. He made a sound like a flummoxed walrus and pulled himself back from the edge of possibly telling Sherlock _exactly_ what he wanted to know. When it was obvious Pollay wasn't going to continue, Sherlock prompted him with a quiet, “Who?” that he tried to make as unthreatening as possible in an effort to not startle the man.

Pollay hid his retreat behind his own irritable wave. “No, nothing like—” He paused, interrupted by a thought. Sherlock forced himself to relax; he could feel his jaws clenching and knew he'd look too much like a pointer who'd just sniffed a bird. And he needed his bird to stay right where it was, and continue its song. “Though things did start to blow up that same day,” he mused in the most egregious tease.

“Blow up?”

“I meant that metaphorically.”

“Oh, _metaphorical_ bombs. Boring.” 

Pollay glanced at his watch and grimaced. “Oh damn. Fel will be here any second now. You’d best leave or she won’t let you go without telling her everything about why you’re here.”

Sherlock and John shared a look. As Sherlock made their goodbyes, John knocked back the remainder of his pint.

When they were crossing the road in front of the pub, John turned to Sherlock. “Was any of that useful? Or did I just waste an entire day off on one mediocre pint and a conversation about incompetent spycraft that I’m going to get arrested for overhearing?”

Sherlock ignored the inexcusably melodramatic portion of that statement. “A few interesting points were made amongst the drivel and clumsy attempts at guile. Firstly, did you notice that when I referred to Deborah’s murder as an assassination, he didn’t correct me?”

“So?”

“Intelligence types are very testy about that word. If you ever use it incorrectly, to their mind, they _always_ correct you.”

“Maybe he wasn’t paying attention.”

“Oh, he was. And at no time during the conversation about Deborah did he acknowledge that I was there when she was shot.”

“Maybe he didn't know.”

“Oh, he knew, but he didn't want me to know that he did.”

“He’s hiding something.”

“Yep.”

As the train stopped-and-started back to London, Sherlock resisted the urge to dive into the new data acquired from Pollay, aware that he most particularly needed to avoid the tiger trap of Pollay's clumsy reference to Mycroft. 

John had been uncharacteristically silent for most of the day, and Sherlock wasn’t sure if it was due to wanting to stay out of Sherlock and Pollay’s way, or if he was brooding again. Sherlock tried to ignore the silence, but it hovered between them all the way to Baker Street.

Sherlock wanted them to be past this—whatever it was that John was hanging onto. Sherlock recognised that he probably was being a terrible, selfish friend for expecting John to move on so soon. But he couldn’t help it; he'd become accustomed to them being more than just Detective + Sidekick. He wanted his friend back in total, not just a spectre hovering on the edge of his field of vision. So he decided to risk their current amity and confront the matter head on. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“No, it’s not nothing. What’s bothering you? Beyond having your precious Saturday wasted.”

John shifted in his chair and avoided Sherlock’s eye. “Why was I there today? There was no reason for me to go.”

“I wanted you there.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what we do?” Sherlock’s attempt to deflect with humour was only partly successful.

John gave him a brief half-smile. “I guess so. It’s just—none of this makes any sense anymore.”

Sherlock didn’t reply, aware that whatever he chose to say was likely to be exactly the wrong thing, based on past experience.

“I just—just when I thought I’d got everything sorted, then—” John trailed off as a pained expression appeared on his face.

“You’ve been seeing your therapist again.”

“Of course I’ve been seeing my therapist. My wife and daughter have just been murdered. That kind of defines ‘stressful life experience’, Sherlock.”

“Oh, all right.” Sherlock turned back to his computer, as always at a loss when John brought up Mary.

He felt John's eyes on him as he typed up the notes from his recent experiments.

“He was wrong, you know.”

“Who?” Sherlock asked, not looking up.

“Magnussen.”

Now Sherlock turned to face him. “What do you mean?”

“At Appledore. When he said the mistake that would destroy all our lives. He was wrong.”

The silent entreaty, “Wasn't he?” at the end of John's statement was almost audible. Sherlock knew platitudes wouldn't serve, so he paused while he calculated the probability of them successfully navigating through their current troubles.

“We’ll be all right. Eventually,” John added as he turned back to the television.

“Of course we will.”

Even though he didn’t want to admit it to himself, Sherlock was glad of the assurance. The two of them each turned to their own thoughts and Sherlock allowed himself to finally dive into the new data acquired that afternoon.

What had he learnt? That Pollay held a grudge against Blythe, likely because he knew there was something even more untoward than usual for MI5 going on with the Moran investigation, and for some reason was willing to risk telling Sherlock about it. Did he expect Sherlock to tell Mycroft? Sherlock couldn’t imagine that his brother didn’t know already. 

It was also obvious that Sherlock had been correct about Moran: he'd made a deal with MI5, most likely approved or arranged by Blythe. What had Moran offered them that Blythe considered worth the bother of hiding him and (probably) arranging a new identity? What would Blythe want that much? 

Information about Mycroft, the voice in his head immediately answered, but Sherlock instinctively dismissed the idea that Moran could know anything that damaging about Mycroft. _Unless he’d heard it from his wife, who’d known Mycroft at Oxford._

Sherlock gasped as the pieces came together in his head.

“What?” John glanced over.

“Nothing. Just an idea.”

Then Sherlock’s analytical functions kicked in. Moran had disappeared eight months ago; presumably the deal had already happened. Why would Blythe have not used what Moran had sold him? If the information was valuable enough for Moran to acquire a new life, Blythe wouldn’t have held back using it. From what Sherlock could tell, the man had been waiting years for this kind of weapon to fall into his lap; even if he hadn’t used it right away, he would have in the weeks after Magnussen’s death, when Mycroft was at his most vulnerable. So logic argued that Moran’s bargaining chip wasn't information about Mycroft.

The next most likely probability depended on the possibility that Moran _had_ been associated with the elder Moriarty, regardless of what he'd told Sherlock that morning at Baker Street. If that premise were correct, the existence of the elder Moriarty, his location and his plans would most definitely have had a great enough value to Blythe. But if Moran had sold Blythe that information eight months ago, why had Moriarty still been at large six months later?

As Sherlock backtracked, another alternative pathway appeared in his mind. And once he began to follow it, a tiny explosion went off in his head, a burst which triggered a nuclear reaction, the blast spreading into a classic mushroom cloud of recognition that annihilated every other tentative speculation that had come before. And in the wake of this blast a perfect, crystalline edifice appeared, constructed of data held together by adamantine logic. It glowed, fired from within by Sherlock’s absolute certainty.

Now it made sense, all of it. Moran, Blythe and Moriarty. Deborah. Even Christina Martin, even though Sherlock now knew she was peripheral and solely Mycroft’s problem. Now that he’d found the key, everything had fallen into place in a whirlpool of pieces resolving themselves into a whole, like a slow-motion film of an explosion played backwards. Details that had previously seemed random and unconnected effortlessly slotted into the structure.

Sherlock wondered when exactly Blythe had made his deal with Moriarty. It obviously had been before Magnussen, because Blythe had told Moriarty about Sherlock’s mission to Kosovo in time for him to make that stupid video and arrange for it to be broadcast on every screen in the country.

Did Mycroft know? Was this another of his irritating schemes where he had “deduced it” as a mental exercise, then finagled Sherlock into gathering the evidence to prove his supposition, in an effort to distract him from the drugs?

One thing Sherlock knew for sure: Deborah had known, and that was why she’d had to die. So Blythe _was_ responsible. Even if Mycroft and Lady Smallwood and all the other jaded SIS insiders might be willing to dismiss Deborah’s death as irrelevant or an unfortunate price to pay to avoid the nuisance of taking Blythe down, Moriarty was a treason no one would be able to ignore.

It was perfect. 

Was it too perfect? For a moment Sherlock panicked at the idea he might have fallen into a trap. He wrapped his hands around the solution; he poked, prodded and turned it over, searching for a flaw, but couldn’t find one. 

His sense of relief was making him lightheaded and he wanted to laugh out loud. He _had_ him. There was no way Blythe was squirming his way out of this, and Sherlock revelled in the knowledge that he had the power to drag the entire rotten edifice down. 

But did he need to? For a moment Sherlock toyed with a radical idea. Bringing Blythe down really had only one effect: helping Mycroft. And the last thing Sherlock wanted to do was help his brother, even a tiny bit. What harm could really result if Blythe got away with Deborah's murder?

“Don't.”

Sherlock glanced over his laptop screen to John. “What?”

“Whatever you're thinking right now, don't do it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You had the same expression on your face when you asked me to bring a gun to your parents' house.”

“You're being ridiculous.”

“Seriously, Sherlock. Just—stop it. You don't want to go there again.”

“No, you're right.” Sherlock wondered if it had been John's intention to allude to Magnussen in an effort to get Sherlock to talk about Mary again. “I misread that one from the very beginning.”

John looked startled. “Well, I never. Sherlock Holmes admits he made a mistake.”

“You make me sound like an egomaniac.”

John gave him a mock glare. “The drugs didn't help.”

“Nope.”

“Sherlock—”

“John,” he replied, cutting off the conversation before their new accord was thrown away.

But he understood what John had meant. He had to do the right thing. He had to not be selfish. And much as he was going to hate it, he was going to have to tell Mycroft.

Then Sherlock realised what might make the bitter pill go down a little more easily. Everyone else had been using their secret, ill-gotten information for their own ends; he might as well join in the fun and games. And if nothing else, the satisfaction gained from forcing Mycroft to beg might just make the disgusting enterprise worthwhile.

~ + ~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only one more chapter to go, folks!


	6. Still the master manipulator

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock's plan for vengeance fails, and he's remarkably okay with that.

The next day Sherlock was replete with newly recovered energy and intent. Now that he had a weapon to use against his brother, he couldn't wait to deploy it.

As soon as he entered the kitchen, he could tell that John was out. Sherlock didn't see any point in waiting for him to come home; he'd resolved to confront Mycroft and he didn't want to waste time. There was no way his brother would discuss anything of importance with John there, anyway, and who knew how the man would react to being in the same room as Mycroft. So Sherlock decided he needn't wait. 

He wondered where his brother was holed up. Ordinarily, the man would be at home, stuffing himself with a massive Sunday lunch provided by his obsequious housekeeper, Mrs White. But with election preparations in their final stages, it was unlikely Mycroft would give himself a day off. So Sherlock thought it most likely his brother was ensconced in the dungeon lair of his ridiculous club.

Upon arrival at the Diogenes Club, Sherlock brushed off the porter with an airy wave and descended the narrow staircase to the basement. He was surprised not to come across the assistant typing away in a corner, keeping her usual eagle eye over the comings and goings around her employer. Sherlock strolled straight into the over-the-top melodrama of Mycroft's home-away-from-home, and to Sherlock's satisfaction, his brother appeared genuinely surprised to see him.

“Your surveillance is getting sloppy,” Sherlock said as he dropped into the chair in front of the desk.

Mycroft only hummed as he inspected Sherlock's appearance for a second and a half before replying. “What makes you think I don't have better things to do with my time than watch you staining tissue samples and shouting at the television?” Mycroft leant back in his chair and folded his hands across his stomach.

 _Lost three and a half pounds. New exercise regime?_ Sherlock wondered as he waited for the grilling to commence.

“I take it from your demeanour that you believe you've solved the Oppenheimer case.” Mycroft grimaced slightly, as if he'd just noticed a bad smell. “Though I can't help but wonder why you think I care. After all, I am not your client.” He paused for effect, though Sherlock couldn't understand why he bothered. Habit, most likely; Sherlock reasoned that Mycroft's little affectations probably still worked on the idiots he surrounded himself with. “Ah, you know she's in Hampshire this weekend. Were you hoping I'd play courier?”

“Not really. And yes, I know you don't care about Doctor Deborah. But you do care about Edwin Blythe, don't you?”

To Sherlock's delight, Mycroft's expression froze, for only a moment, but long enough to tell him that he now had his brother's _full_ attention.

“You have evidence Sir Edwin is connected?” Regardless of his surprise, Mycroft's tones were as cool and controlled as usual. But Sherlock knew the hook was set. 

He let his brother relax back into his usual attitude of just-fed predator before delivering his follow-up punch. “No, I'm here about Blythe and Moriarty.”

Mycroft's reaction was all that Sherlock could have hoped for: a momentary flash of excitement, then avarice before the professional mask crashed down, negating all expression. But Mycroft's eyes almost glowed at the prospect of evidence that would bring down his most persistent and dangerous rival.

“Thought you might be interested,” Sherlock teased. They both held their ground for almost a minute, each waiting for the other to flinch. Sherlock knew he shouldn't be enjoying this as much as he was, but the voice in the back of his head—the one that usually counselled caution around his brother—had been effectively silenced since the previous evening.

“What do you want?” Mycroft eventually broke, with an almost-believable, put-upon sigh.

“Something you're not going to want to give me.”

“Don't play games, Sherlock. This isn't one of your meaningless little puzzles; this involves the security of the nation. If a senior Intelligence officer has been compromised—”

“I want you to admit what you did,” Sherlock replied quietly, forcing his brother to shut up and listen for once.

“Which particular imagined offence are you referring to now?”

Sherlock rolled his eyes at the requisite “imagined”. “What you did to Mary.”

Sherlock could tell that Mycroft was barely holding back another sigh, this time of disappointment. “I did nothing to Mrs Watson, Sherlock. How many times—”

“Was it the CIA? Did you call up one of your old chums and sell her to them like a piece—”

“Your flair for melodrama does you a disservice, as always.”

Sherlock stood. “The truth, Mycroft. For once in your life—just tell the truth.” He hadn't noticed leaning over, hands on the desk. But somehow he'd arrived there, staring across the shortened distance into his brother's impassive face.

“What do you want me to say?” Mycroft raised a hand to hold off Sherlock's protests and he let the man get away with it. “I had nothing to do with the accident. If you can bring yourself to believe me.” Mycroft's disinterested shrug ratcheted Sherlock's anger up a level.

“How did they find her?” he spat out.

“As I told you before, killing Magnussen drew exactly the wrong kind of attention to all of you, if your plan had been to keep her location secret from the people who wanted her dead.”

“No. Sorry, not good enough. The _entire_ truth, Mycroft.”

They stared at each other and Sherlock saw a tiny flicker cross his brother's face. Was it fear or disappointment, he wondered. Sherlock's knuckles were sore from pressing on the desk and he was starting to sweat in his coat from the damp, musty heat of the room, but he forced himself to not flinch or blink under the penetrating stare that had disarmed politicians and Intelligence agents on three continents.

One of them would have to make a move, and Sherlock knew that Mycroft could out-stare a cat, so he stood, straightened his coat and headed for the door. As Sherlock reached it, Mycroft finally broke. “Will you tell Christina?”

Sherlock stopped, but did not turn back. “Of course not; she'd just tell you and you don't deserve to know.”

“She's your client—”

“So?” Sherlock spun on a heel and took two strides into the room before remembering he was supposed to be storming out in a huff, and halted. 

“What will you do without cases, Sherlock? Because if you don't give her the solution that she hired you to find, she'll crucify you across the internet. Christina is not Lady Smallwood; she has little concern for the political consequences of her actions and she will lash out. And I won't so much as lift a finger to stop her.”

Sherlock felt the blood drain from his face as he stared at his brother. “No—no one will care—” he stammered as he scrambled to recover.

“Do you really think any client will ever again darken your door once she lets the world know you take your clients' money, then use the information you obtain for blackmail? And don't for a moment think you'll ever see another Met case.”

Flabbergasted, Sherlock felt his face pull into a mulish scowl. Mycroft knew what his cases meant to him. “So much for your supposed concern about my sobriety.”

“This is much bigger than you.”

“And you as well, brother. Prove to me just how important this matter is to the security of the nation.” Sherlock ambled back into the room, confidence recovered that he finally had the man where he wanted him. “Stop putting your own petty pride ahead of things you claim to value and _tell me the truth_.”

To Sherlock's surprise, Mycroft seemed to give the demand serious consideration.

“All right. But you must understand that I only had your well—”

“Stop stalling.” Sherlock sat as Mycroft forced his ruffled feathers down, with little good grace.

Mycroft gave him a glare, but there was little venom behind it and Sherlock began to suspect that he might have just walked into a trap. His brother settled into his story without the necessity of further threats. “As I'm sure you've already deduced, I knew of Mary Morstan's true identity not long after she began seeing John. She was remarkably sloppy for someone with her—”

“She wasn't working for you? Ever?”

“I believe I've already answered that question.” Mycroft paused to settle further into his chair and shift into the pontificating mode that Sherlock hated so much. “I can only guess she assumed no one would be paying attention to John now that the world thought you were dead. I decided to allow the relationship to continue—”

Sherlock snorted. “As if you could have done anything about it.”

“At the very least, I could have done precisely what you've accused me of doing. However, it was obvious that John had been struggling ever since that day at Bart's—”

“Like you've ever cared about John. You just wanted him preoccupied when I returned so I'd come back to work with you again. As if I ever would.”

“What an asinine delusion. Oh, of course, everything in the world is about you; how silly of me for forgetting. Do you want to hear this or not?”

“'Just like old times.' That was what you said the day of the wedding. Terribly sloppy of you, brother.”

Mycroft paled slightly, Sherlock was delighted to see. “Yes, well. Regardless, I knew from the beginning that allowing her to remain in John's life was a risk, but I thought it one worth taking if it meant you learned a little independence. But in the end it was a disaster. Anna Anderson—that was her real name—” Sherlock flinched. John would be horrified if he found out that Sherlock knew Mary's real name when he didn't. “—refused to leave behind her previous life, and took up old habits the moment a threat appeared. It was your action that forced my hand, Sherlock, deciding that you had to kill Magnussen for her. I'd given her a chance and she proved she wasn't worthy of it. And then you chose the only path that could possibly worsen the situation, all to bolster your own ego.”

“Don't pretend Mary's death was ever about me. I killed Magnussen for all of us. Even you, brother, and you know exactly why.”

“Stop trying to be cryptic, Sherlock. Regardless, even if Mrs Watson's indiscretions could be overlooked—which I never would in a million years—and even if the supposed threat to her was the only reason you did it, which you just admitted it wasn't, how long would it be before you felt the need to endanger yourself for their sakes again?”

“Yes, I messed up your plan to have Mary kill Magnussen for you.”

“What?” Mycroft looked almost genuinely shocked and Sherlock couldn't tell if it was because Sherlock had deduced his real scheme, hidden behind the scheme he'd wanted Sherlock to think was his actual plan, or if Sherlock had got it spectacularly wrong. “Why in heaven's name would I do such a thing? Seriously, Sherlock, I can't—” Mycroft paused and huffed a bit before continuing. “The fact you think I would even contemplate such a plan shows just how little you understand the consequences of your leaping off the rails the way you have.”

“You can't expect me to believe you didn't know Magnussen was playing all of us.”

“Sherlock, just—stop it.” Mycroft was back to rubbing his forehead. “What possible motive could I have to putting you at such risk in that way?”

“To get rid of Magnussen. And don't tell me you didn't want him dead.” Sherlock couldn't help the disdain in his tone. Where had this stupid version of his brother come from? He wanted his real brother back.

“I had him contained, Sherlock. We have for years. But I suppose that wasn't enough for you, selfish—”

“You knew Magnussen was playing us all, even you, and because of national security or politics or the balance of trade or whatever justification you had all those years for sucking up to him, you allowed him to think he was getting away with it. Or maybe he really did own you, too. But seeing as you're the most boring person on the face of the earth and have never had a life, I can't imagine what he could have blackmailed _you_ about. Then he became too much of a problem, so you whispered in someone's ear that he had to be taken down a peg and you manipulated someone in the government into calling that stupid inquiry. Not because it would actually do anything useful, but because it would bring Lady Smallwood into his path and you knew Magnussen would blackmail her because you knew about her husband and the schoolgirl. 

“And where would she go for help? Not you, oh no. You've spent twenty-five years convincing people you're the ultimate selfish bastard, so you knew she'd come to me. And once I was on the case he'd try to manipulate me. And the only leverage Magnussen might have over me was John. Magnussen knew how to get to you; and if he could figure out how, you _had_ to know he'd try. You were counting on Mary going after him to protect herself, because Mary was John's pressure point. You were trying to kill two birds with one stone: Mary kills Magnussen, and Mary gets caught and put away for life or you just get rid of her by telling your CIA friends it was their stray weapon who'd done it and they'd do your dirty work for you.

“But then John and I got involved and your whole ridiculous scheme fell apart.” Sherlock paused to catch his breath as he watched Mycroft's complete lack of reaction. “Was it you who told Magnussen who she was?”

Sherlock didn't know why he bothered with that question. If the answer was “no” he wouldn't be able to trust it, and if it was “yes” he wouldn't know what to do with it. For some reason, Mycroft had begun radiating an aura of disappointment halfway through Sherlock's deduction and now it had made its way to his brother's face, manifesting as a pinch-mouthed grimace. “I never needed to. He offered me that information after I'd found it for myself.”

Mycroft seemed to be waiting for Sherlock to shout that he would never speak to him again and stomp out of the room. The usual. But Sherlock knew that doing so would accomplish nothing other than feed Mycroft's self-satisfaction. Instead, he wrestled with the shameful memory that had been haunting him for months: Magnussen opening that closet at Appledore, exposing the extent of Sherlock's folly and miscalculation, and the horror elicited by John's looking to him for answers and having none.

“I understand how much Mary Watson meant to you—”

“You can't imagine what's it's like to have a real friend, Mycroft.”

“If you say so.” Mycroft sighed. “You insisted on hearing this; you don't get to complain that it doesn't accord with your preconceptions. And yes, I do understand how important the Watsons are to you. But I could not allow her to continue to endanger you. And in the end, it was another threat that brought about that resolution.” Mycroft paused, watching for the reaction that Sherlock did his best to deny him. He couldn't help being curious, though, as he still didn't know exactly what had happened. Sherlock owed it to John to acquire that information and hold it in trust for him until the time was right for John to hear it. “The day before you were to fly to Kosovo, I received a note through diplomatic channels informing me that the Americans had issued a rendition order for you.”

“What? Why?”

“Magnussen, of course. On top of the Bond Air fiasco, Magnussen was the last straw.”

“Why? Magnussen was a parasite; even his American 'clients' hated him. And I found the code for The Woman's phone. They got their data.”

“But you allowed yourself to be distracted. The best possible interpretation of what happened at Appledore was that you were led astray by your ego. After your adolescent fascination with the Adler woman, they likely thought you'd become an expensive and unreliable luxury. Your record of astonishing unprofessionalism, on top of obvious weaknesses that could be exploited in future forced their hand.” Mycroft made a dismissive wave as if batting away a fly, which chilled Sherlock a little, to think his brother could dismiss him so easily after what he'd just recounted about Mary. “Regardless of the reason why, it meant I had to find a way to keep you in England. The Americans wouldn't have dared attempt to take you here. But in Kosovo—”

“Did you have your first twinge of regret for helping the CIA maintain those torture sites? Oh, pardon me, 'enhanced interrogation' sites. And I don't believe the Americans would bother with me. They'd come after you.”

Sherlock could tell Mycroft was barely holding back a waspish retort. It was remarkably mild when it finally managed to force its way past his teeth. “Would you like the telephone number of the man who sent me the note? I'm sure he would have no qualms about confirming what I've told you.”

“So it was you behind that parade at Heathrow when I was leaving for India. Did Blythe ever figure out you manipulated him into that?”

“I believe not. At least, not until it no longer mattered.”

Sherlock paused and felt himself smile slightly as two pieces connected. “Blythe told the Americans who shot Magnussen,” Sherlock mused. He was liking the man less and less with every passing moment, though he recognised that was likely Mycroft's principal motive for telling him. 

“So I've been informed.”

Sherlock watched Mycroft watch him as he digested that information. “How do I know you're not lying so that I'll tell you what I found out about him?”

Mycroft rolled his eyes. “For heaven's sake, Sherlock. I've already given you what you wanted to know.”

“No you haven't. You still haven't told me _why_. Why now? Why not after she'd shot me if you were so bloody concerned about my safety?”

Mycroft was suddenly solemn again. “By declining to kill you, she demonstrated that my initial decision to give her the opportunity to prove her worth might not have been misguided, as I'd been beginning to think.”

“And yet you had no qualms about selling her to the CIA.” Sherlock leapt to his feet and stalked to the far end of the room, before turning on his heel and stopping at Mycroft's expression. 

Sadness. Not contrition; no one would believe Mycroft capable of that emotion. But the sadness seemed genuine and Sherlock didn't know what to make of that. Frustrated at not knowing how to respond, he decided to default to their usual.

“Do you expect me to be grateful you deigned to give her a few more months? I'm sure John will be thrilled you allowed her to live long enough to deliver her child before having them bumped off.” 

As his brother watched, inexplicably silent, Sherlock forced his mind to settle on pondering why Mycroft was behaving this way. Why was Mycroft sad? He should be his usual disappointed judge and jury, raining pronouncements down on Sherlock, putting him in his place. The perpetual child to Mycroft's implacable adult.

Sherlock looked up from staring at his hands to Mycroft's solemn examination, surprisingly devoid of everything Sherlock expected to see there. Regardless, he knew he had lost control of the conversation, as always. His attempts to talk about Mycroft's role in Mary's death were irredeemably tainted with his brother's insistence on tying it up with Magnussen and Sherlock was heartily sick of it all.

He could force his brother to wrangle and dance around the arguments for hours, but in the end it wouldn't matter. Much as he hated to admit it, Sherlock couldn't refute that he had been at least partially responsible for the sequence of events that had led to Mary and Grace's deaths.

In the end, Sherlock's plan had largely backfired. He wondered if he should even bother holding back his information about Doctor Deborah and Blythe and all the rest of it. At least discussing it would get the conversation away from Mary and the clamouring shame that filled his head.

For at least three minutes they sat in silence, at opposite ends of the room, while realisation after realisation piled up in Sherlock's mind. How was he going to tell John? What _could_ he tell John?

“Did you manage to find evidence linking Moran to the elder Moriarty's organisation?” Mycroft's tone was uncharacteristically conciliatory, and it gave Sherlock a focus for his displaced anger. 

“Who cares? Moran doesn't matter anymore. Anyone who was paying attention—” He glanced up to glare at Mycroft for a moment, before turning his attention back to the floor, “—knew about Moriarty and Moran—”

“Evidence, Sherlock,” Mycroft replied with his more usual hint of the pedagogue.

“The real prize is Moriarty and Blythe.”

Sherlock hadn't intended to so easily give away his greatest prize. He'd wanted to make Mycroft suffer for it, more so than he'd managed to do so far. But Sherlock was so very tired of all of it; he just wanted to be done with it so that he could delete everything.

When he glanced up, he saw that Mycroft's eyebrows had hitched up a millimetre or two. “Do you actually know anything, or are you just saying that for effect? You've teased this notion twice already without bothering to give any details. I'm beginning to wonder if you know anything at all.”

That response was a bit underwhelming, Sherlock thought, until he realised why. “So you already knew. Was I just your donkey again, doing all the work you can't be bothered to get off your fat arse to do yourself?” He tried to employ his usual venom and failed miserably.

“None of this was about Blythe in the beginning. But I've had my suspicions about him for years, and I needed an outsider's viewpoint on recent events. It needed to be someone who could get people to talk in ways they never would with me.”

Sherlock stared back across the desk for five seconds while he gathered his thoughts. Mycroft had admitted a failing. And not just a failing, but the need for Sherlock's help. He was so discombobulated by his brother's not grinding him into the dust for his mistakes about Magnussen, that Sherlock didn't know how to acknowledge it without sounding insincere. So he ignored the impulse and carried on. “I found the key where I least expected to.”

Mycroft nodded.

“It began with Doctor Deborah taking me to see your 'friend'.” Sherlock paused while Mycroft rolled his eyes again, in a slight pantomime that told Sherlock he was playing along with the pretence that they'd moved on, bringing the conversation back to their usual comfortable, if pointed, sniping. “I didn't know it at the time, but Deborah's intention was that after a cursory examination I would see the operators behind Moran and follow the trail to Blythe.”

“But you missed it.”

To Sherlock's surprise, it was just a statement, not an explicit criticism, so he acknowledged it with a nod. “Yes. But Blythe figured out what she was trying to do and he killed her for it.”

“Were you able to determine her motive for doing so? It always struck me as a bizarre course of action on her part. To take that risk, her objective must have been of great importance to her.”

“He was blackmailing her. Had been for years, apparently.”

“And she thought to use you to blackmail him back, even if only implicitly. You spent weeks grieving the death of someone who thought nothing of the danger to you of her plans,” Mycroft mused, almost to himself. “What had he been blackmailing her for?”

“She'd been living under a false identity since 1971.”

“Oh, I doubt that was the cause of it. If that were true it would be in her MI5 file, so likely known by everyone who'd had access to it. And that's not the sort of thing the SIS has an issue with, as a general rule. No, it must have been something else.”

Sherlock scowled, annoyed at his having solved a forty-four year-old cold case and tying it in to treason in the security services being dismissed as irrelevant. “You're just saying that because you're upset I got to it before you did. Not that it really matters why she was being blackmailed.” 

“It might, in the end.” Mycroft's native smugness was beginning to bleed through again, so Sherlock ensured to sneer back at him. Some traditions deserved to be upheld, after all.

“Regardless, she wanted me to investigate Blythe and instead I thought she wanted me to follow the obvious link from Moran to Moriarty.”

“Then how did you end up finding the trail to Blythe?”

“Via Moriarty, eventually. He'd been sloppy enough to broadcast his first video to correspond with an event whose timing every few people knew about.” Mycroft nodded and Sherlock wondered why the man thought he needed to be encouraging. “That meant he had information from one of a small group of people in the SIS and the government. Stupid and sloppy for a supposed criminal mastermind.” 

“He wanted us to find Blythe.”

“Stop interrupting.” Sherlock continued over Mycroft's chuckle. His brother's growing equanimity was becoming irksome, and not just because he'd successfully manipulated the conversation from Sherlock's concerns to his own. “Moran had told Moriarty about Blythe. Moran knew Blythe had been involved in his surveillance for years and wanted to discredit him. Moran was cleverer than we gave him credit for; he knew Blythe wanted you gone and would see Moriarty as an opportunity to make that happen. They just used each other as tools to get to you; that was what drove the entire plan from the beginning.” 

“How polyamorous of him,” Mycroft interrupted with a smirk of his own. 

Sherlock mock-shuddered at the allusion before continuing. “Moriarty wanted you to die because he blamed you for his brother's suicide, and he knew the best way to flush you out of your lair—” Sherlock glanced around the room and shot his brother a thin smirk, “—was to threaten me. And he couldn't use me to get to you if the Americans were torturing me in Diego Garcia or Morocco, or wherever. He needed me in England. ”

“And you accuse _me_ of overreacting.”

“Vengeance is the least I would expect from you, brother.”

“Murder is hardly a substitute for forward planning. But I suppose in a pinch it will suffice.”

They shared a pair of secretive half-smiles and Sherlock felt something unclench in his chest.

“So you think Moriarty knew about the rendition order?”

“If he owned a British Intelligence officer, he might have owned an American one, as well.” Sherlock knew he'd stumbled onto something else Mycroft wasn't telling him, because his brother's face took on the stillness that indicated two puzzle pieces had just slotted together in his mind. “Moriarty most likely approached Blythe when I was off in Serbia, destroying his Eastern European operations. He'd hired Moran to blow up Parliament because he knew your lot would find out and bring me back to deal with it. He even told Blythe to suggest it to Lady Smallwood, to make sure you didn't drag your feet.”

“He wanted you out of Serbia before his entire network was destroyed, so it served two of his purposes.”

Sherlock shrugged. “Possibly.”

Mycroft smiled one of his shark smiles. “Definitely.”

“Blythe was compromised from the very beginning. He never reported his contact with Moriarty, did he?” Mycroft shook his head and Sherlock continued. “As soon as the intelligence about the bomb plot was received, all of a sudden another Moriarty appears out of the woodwork and Eddie figured out what was really going on.” Sherlock paused to scowl at Mycroft's slightly widening smile. “And instead of doing the proper thing and reporting the approach to his bosses, Blythe decided to use Moriarty to take you out and clear his path to whatever dull and meaningless prize he seems to think you're keeping away from him.”

“Well done, Sherlock. No, I'm not being sarcastic. But you still haven't given me the evidence linking Blythe to Deborah Oppenheimer's murder.”

 _Damn._ Sherlock had been hoping Mycroft wouldn't notice. “Does Deborah's murder even matter anymore?” He could tell the answer from his brother's sour expression and it surprised him. “I'm giving you your most dangerous rival's head on a platter and you're quibbling about minor matters.”

“Your client will not share that assessment.”

“My client is your problem now, Mycroft.”

His brother's frown upgraded to a full-out scowl. While Sherlock was glad that Mycroft chose not to pursue the matter further, he knew the subject would be making a re-appearance before they were done. 

“There are no minor matters in this case, Sherlock. And on a more pragmatic note, when you explain this to the Home Secretary, which you will have to do.” Mycroft almost smiled on seeing Sherlock's grimace. “She will demand you make those connections explicit. Because if you cannot explain how you traversed from a murder investigation to claiming that one of this country's most senior Intelligence officers is a traitor, she's not going to believe a word you say.”

“What are you talking about, _claiming_?”

“Your story must be water-tight, or she will have to question if any of it is true. I cannot—well, I was going to say I cannot believe you could be so selfish as to indulge your desire for revenge for what you think happened to Mary Watson and attempting to blackmail _me_ , but that would be a lie. When you realised what you had, your first thought was to it lord over me, without a single thought of the consequences. Well, congratulations, Sherlock; you've quite possibly ensured Blythe's ongoing survival and destroyed our best chance to bring him down.” 

Sherlock blinked, startled by the sudden turn of the conversation and Mycroft's lack of appreciation for what he'd accomplished by hacking his way through the thickets of the case and finding the solution. “Deborah was murdered by a professional, as proven by the physical evidence at the site. According to what Deborah herself told me during the broadcast hacking investigation, someone had been blackmailing her for years, but this had changed recently. She strongly implied this change was due to her efforts to push back at whoever was responsible. Her wife confirmed that Deborah had no known enemies outside MI5, so it had to be someone within MI5 who hired the assassin.”

“There is a disturbingly high number of 'most likelys' and leaps of faith in that tale.”

“The widow herself practically picked me up and dumped me into Blythe's lap, her hints were so broad.” Sherlock ploughed on without pausing as he didn't want to give Mycroft an in for another rant. “That caused me to focus my attention on Blythe's possible motives, and the lead Deborah gave me by taking me to meet Christina Martin.” Mycroft's expression turned owlish again at the mention of Christina. “I found out about Deborah's false identity because she was the missing girl in one of the cold cases Lestrade gave me. A 'coincidence' I haven't yet worked out. Unless you already knew about Deborah's real identity and told Lestrade to give me that case, because you were joining in the game of leading me by the nose to get me to do your donkey work in your efforts to bring down Blythe.”

Mycroft shook his head. “No, I asked him to give you the Robichaud case. I was hoping to find a connection between Nick Bowman with someone else of interest.”

“Who?”

“Let's finish this puzzle first, shall we?”

Sherlock decided to let that go for the moment, though he filed it away for later follow-up. “It was obvious that my interpretation of what Deborah wanted when she took me to meet Christina had been incorrect, so I turned by attention to another aspect of the Moran case: Blythe's investigation.” Mycroft's gaze took on a new intensity that told Sherlock he was heading towards the solution he was interested in. Sherlock was still annoyed with himself for allowing Mycroft to manipulate him into giving his brother the information he'd wanted. But Sherlock recognised that now he'd started he wanted to get it all off his chest. He knew Mycroft didn't care about Deborah—Christina would be the one who was concerned about that part of the story—but Sherlock knew his desire to show off his skills had nothing to do with the case and everything to do with his brother. “Did your 'friend' tell you about that?”

“Your client—” Sherlock grinned at Mycroft's obvious discomfort with Christina's recurring presence in the story, “—provided me with two salient facts whose importance she sensed but did not understand.”

“About Blythe's investigation of the Moran case?”

“Yes.”

“Why has Moran never been charged? He was caught red-handed.”

“Why do you think?”

“People blame politics for the fact the investigation had obviously been purposely bungled. But Blythe's real motive for sabotaging it—another crime, you'll note; I hope you're keeping score—was because he didn't want any evidence to arise that might allow someone—” He nodded at Mycroft, who gave him the tiniest hint of a smile in return, “—to follow the trail from Moran to Moriarty, and thence to Blythe himself. But my principal problem was I didn't have anything to connect Blythe to Moriarty. I mean, he had all the motive in the world, and the timing of the first video was _very telling_ , but I needed to prove he'd actually done something that helped Moriarty.”

Mycroft leapt into Sherlock's pause for breath. “The suggestion to bring you back. Against my wishes, I must add, and not just because I had _no_ desire to waste my valuable time winkling you out of the Baron's basement. We needed you to finish the job.”

“I did finish the job,” Sherlock protested.

“So you keep insisting. We do have reports, however, of activities that point to—”

“Oh, _reports_ ,” Sherlock sniped. “Reports by whom? Who are these idiots? Is there supposed to be a third Moriarty now, running around—”

“Sherlock, can we stay with the matter in hand?”

Sherlock heard himself harrumph, to his annoyance. Harrumphing was something boring old pedants did, and he was in no way prepared for the boring harrumphing phase of his life. “Blythe's little toady Pollay gave him up. Moriarty was probably desperate to get me out of Serbia before one of the Baron's men tattled that there was still another one of them gadding about causing mayhem. By going after Moran's daughter, Moriarty as much as told us that he knew Moran had made a deal with MI5—the attack was a warning telling him to keep his mouth shut—and who else other than Blythe would have the authority to make a deal with Moran?”

“How did you get Pollay to talk to you?”

“I listened.” The momentary lightening of his brother's expression told Sherlock that the man had caught the allusion. “You primed him to betray Blythe, though, didn't you?”

“I brought to his attention—or at least caused him to recognise—Blythe's plans for him. He was understandably unimpressed.” Mycroft's shoulder twitch was a hint of a shrug. “I knew we would need Pollay to talk to make any headway against Blythe.”

 _Still the master manipulator, brother mine,_ Sherlock thought with grudging admiration. It was so much easier to appreciate Mycroft's skills when they were being used against someone else. “And so he turned on Blythe. I did wonder why it was so easy to get him to blab it all.” 

“I'm even more surprised at Blythe allowing Pollay to know as much as he does. To let him walk around with all that incriminating information, available for other people to find.” Mycroft paused, lost in his own thoughts for a second or two, and Sherlock wondered why he was only sharing his thoughts on Blythe now. “I wonder what else Pollay's holding onto, waiting to expose to his own advantage.”

“And yours.”

“That depends very much on the information.”

“What advantage did telling—oh. Blythe was going to throw him to the wolves if anyone found out about him and Moriarty.”

Mycroft smiled, suddenly as avuncular as a teacher whose favourite student had just won a scholarship. “Yes. Pity Doctor Oppenheimer didn't have the patience to play her cards at all well. But then—” Mycroft sniffed. “She was an amateur.”

Sherlock held back a laugh. “Mary was a professional and she wasn't able to see the long game, either.”

“Mary Watson was an assassin, Sherlock, not an agent. Her capabilities were significantly different.”

Sherlock paused, unsure if he wanted to go back to discussing Mary now that he and Mycroft had reached some sort of workable accord on that situation. But he was never going to find out—and for John's sake, he needed to—unless he pestered his brother until he gave in.

“So, you've found a way to make me responsible for your failings. Congratulations, Mycroft.”

“Shall I make this simpler for you, then?” Mycroft ticked off the points on his fingers, as if he really were speaking to a child. “Magnussen was murdered by you. The deaths of Mary and Grace Watson happened as a result of that—”

“With some assistance from you, brother mine—”

“Yes, well.” Mycroft nodded in grudging acknowledgement of the point. “And Deborah Oppenheimer was murdered to prevent her from telling you about Sir Edwin's shenanigans. It's almost as dangerous to be your friend as your enemy, and not in the manner I'd normally be referring to. Considering your more than friendly relationship with narcissism, I'm surprised you've not been more forward in claiming credit for it all being about you.”

“Unlike you, brother, I don't consider being responsible for the deaths of my friends to be an accomplishment.” Sherlock paused and was surprised Mycroft had no cutting, pithy response about goldfish and not having friends (at least, not ones still around to claim the right), or other posturings. “But if Mary wasn't working for you, who was she working for? She didn't just show up in John's life, as if by magic, the perfect woman for him.”

Mycroft seemed to be pondering the question, even though of course he already had his answer prepared. It was one of his affectations Sherlock disliked the most, because there was no way Mycroft hadn't formulated and tested every possible hypothesis already. “I have always wondered if she hadn't been working for the CIA all along.”

“That's ridiculous; she was on—oh.” Sherlock gasped. “Of course. But what about your deal? They let me go in exchange for her.”

“Perhaps they'd always meant to let you go. Perhaps they were testing me to see what I'd be willing to offer in exchange for your safety.” At Sherlock's frown, Mycroft clarified. “It's always useful to know someone's limits and learn what their priorities are. Who or what they'd make sacrifices to protect. Perhaps they'd always meant to kill her. Perhaps she'd been sent to John because they suspected there was another Moriarty brother, and if that were true he would come after you, and her assignment had been to kill him when he revealed himself. Perhaps they always meant to kill her after she dispatched the elder Moriarty brother.” Mycroft focused on his fingers twirling his teacup, avoiding Sherlock's eyes. “It's impossible to know, based on currently available data.”

“Or perhaps you're just trying to wriggle out from responsibility for having sold her to the people who murdered her.”

Mycroft sighed again. “For heaven's sake, Sherlock. If you think I would ever ignore your safety in order to protect John Watson's sensibilities—well, I know you understand me better than that.” He paused and his expression had Sherlock wary again. “I have wondered at your always referring to the accident as 'Mary's accident'. You never mention the child. What does John think about that?”

“That was the clumsiest segue I've seen you attempt in years. Why do you always grimace when I refer to Christina Martin as your friend? Especially as two months ago you were most adamant that was exactly who she is to you.”

“Speaking of clumsy attempts to deflect attention away from one's own miscalculations.” Mycroft almost smirked at him. “I think it would be best if we set aside the matter of Mary Watson. Both of us failed there, Sherlock—” Mycroft held up a hand again to fend off another protest, but Sherlock ignored it.

“Oh, very convenient for you. Where does that leave John?”

“Chasing after you across London, solving your petty little puzzles in order to have an excuse to avoid the work you _should_ be doing. Using your abilities—” 

“Using my abilities to do your work, you mean. Helping you kowtow to vermin like Magnussen, hide their crimes from—”

“—to their full capacity for work worthy of your talents—”

“—the public, propping up your rotten Establishment—”

“—instead of capitulating to your self-destructive addictions.”

“—so that you can continue to live like some corrupt Middle Eastern potentate—”

“And I'm not just referring to the drugs, Sherlock, but the people you surround yourself with.”

“—pulling the strings of government, unaccountable—”

“Don't pretend you care one jot for accountability.”

“—for every crime you facilitate. I won't say 'commit' because you're too lazy to commit your own crimes.”

When Sherlock stopped to draw breath, he realised that Mycroft had stopped some time before. The man looked as exhausted as Sherlock felt. Mycroft was rubbing a hand over his forehead as if trying to fend off a headache and Sherlock tried to force himself to not sympathise.

“We need to get beyond this, Sherlock. You need to accept that I'm not going to stay out of your life until you move past this addiction to dangerous people and situations. You need to find another way to cope with boredom, before it catches up with you.”

“That's what the cases are for. You know that.”

“Well, obviously they're not enough anymore. You need—“ Mycroft broke off with a sigh and a vague, ineffectual gesture Sherlock couldn't interpret. “I don't know what to say anymore. I don't know what you need, Sherlock. I just—I don't.”

Sherlock was startled by the genuine-seeming exhaustion in his brother's voice. He didn't know what to say, other than to give in to the need to turn the conversation away from himself. “What do _you_ need?”

Mycroft looked up from contemplating the surface of his desk and his expression was the saddest Sherlock had ever seen it. “I need you to be safe. I need you to be well, content in your life. Doing constructive work.”

“I won't work with you again.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“I've been—“ A small, rueful smile briefly appeared on Mycroft's face and Sherlock knew he was going to talk about Christina. “An outside viewpoint on our situation has been pressed upon me. That I need to learn how to trust you.”

“The two of you seem—cosy.” Sherlock knew that Mycroft understood what he was doing; he was surprised, though, when his brother chose to indulge him. “She's very conveniently placed to help you, I couldn't help but notice.

“Christina is a person, not a plot device, Sherlock. She has her own motives for being involved. As to the other, don't ask questions you don't want the answer to,” Mycroft continued with a smirk.

“That's—mildly revolting. But then, she married Sebastian Moran; that's all anyone needs to know about her taste in men.”

Mycroft rolled his eyes. “You and Mummy; I can't decide which of you is the more nauseating romantic.”

“Take that back.”

“No.” Mycroft added a cocked eyebrow to his smirk, then became more solemn. “In some ways Christina and I are well suited; in others not. And that is the last that will be said on the matter.”

Sherlock mock-shuddered again. “Thank god.”

“So no, you need never fear that there might be another person in my life to take my attention away from your welfare.”

“That's part of the problem.”

Mycroft gave him a questioning look as he refilled his cup and gestured to the pot. Sherlock shook his head at the offer.

“Maybe if you had someone else to pester I might get a moment's peace.” Sherlock sniffed. “Might do you some good, as well. Make you less—” Sherlock made a dismissive wave in Mycroft's direction, “—you.”

Mycroft was obviously startled, though he recovered after a second; he opened his mouth to snap off a reply, then shut it. Sherlock indulged in a moment of probably-unwarranted satisfaction at the rare accomplishment of rendering his brother speechless.

After taking a sip of tea and ceremoniously replacing the cup on its saucer, Mycroft folded his hands and stared pointedly at Sherlock across the desk, as if about to provide a summation at the end of a particularly tedious meeting. “Where do we go from here, Sherlock?”

“John's never going to forgive you, no matter what you say.”

“Nor would I expect him to. But John is not my principal concern.”

“Or your concern at all.”

Mycroft's “where's that awful smell coming from” expression made a momentary re-appearance and Sherlock wondered just how much of this display was for effect. “When I spoke to my CIA contact, I lied to him to protect John. I said John knew nothing of his wife's past. Not for his sake, I admit, but because I knew if you lost both of them it would destroy you. I endangered that deal to protect him—”

“Because—”

“You can't expect me to be concerned about John beyond your relationship with him, or to care for him the way I do for you. You're my brother. I—I would do anything to keep you safe.” Mycroft paused again, and Sherlock sat stock-still, Mycroft's embarrassment a slow-motion car crash that flung spinning emotional shrapnel across the room. The uncharacteristic sentimentality silenced both of them for a few seconds. “I don't understand why you can't see that,” Mycroft whispered almost to himself, doubling-down on the discomfort for both of them.

Sherlock squirmed in his chair, desperate to fire back a retort that would not come to mind, one that would restore Mycroft to his usual form. Perhaps he should taunt him with the notion that Christina had already made Mycroft less like himself, as he was now willing to allow such free rein to sentiment. This softer, emotionally flabby Mycroft was irritating. Where had the man's fire gone? Sherlock thought he'd rather have his brother's rage than this soppy, emotional simulacrum. 

“I see your girlfriend's already neutered you rather effectively.”

 _Ah, there it is_ , Sherlock noted with a mental nod as the familiar blue fire reappeared in his brother's eyes, the one that had always sent a delicious susurration up Sherlock's spine.

“Take that back,” Mycroft whispered with the hint of menace Sherlock had loved to hear ever since he'd been old enough to recognise it.

“No.”

“This has nothing to do with Christina.”

“I know.” Sherlock bared his teeth in a way that anyone else might interpret as a smile, but Mycroft knew not to. Sherlock was relieved to see a hint of it returned, a form of forgiveness he allowed himself to cherish.

“I _am_ proud of you, Sherlock. And I apologise for never having said so to you before.” Sherlock's head snapped up, stunned at Mycroft's words. “But that is why—something like Magnussen is so disheartening. To see you backslide when you've come so far. And yes, John has helped, but you've accomplished most of it on your own.”

“What is in that tea?” Sherlock demanded, annoyed that his brother just would not let the matter go, and desperate to change the tenor of the conversation. 

Mycroft chuckled, obviously relieved at the opportunity to release some of the tension thrumming between them. “I shall have to ask Andrea. Perhaps she's been in contact with your friend Wiggins.”

Sherlock took him up on the proffered olive branch. “I shall endeavour to not shoot anyone.”

“That would be appreciated.”

Sherlock was relieved to have finally managed to push his brother past the testing terrain of sentiment, to emerge into the familiar landscape of banter at ten paces. “This isn't really over, I hope you realise.”

Mycroft caught the reference immediately. “I'd expect nothing less from you, little brother. But when John finds his way past his grief, I suggest you do so, as well.”

“Stop telling me what to do, big brother.” Sherlock stood, pretending to ignore Mycroft's disappointment, as he always did. One day he might give the man the shock of his life by paying attention to his concerns. The look on his face might just be worth it.

As he headed for the door, he heard Mycroft behind him, “This must be the last time, Sherlock.”

With a huff, Sherlock turned back. “What is this, the fourth 'last time'? The fifth?”

“Next time it will not be me who will be watching. Well, not _just_ me. You've made the stakes much too high.”

Sherlock didn't reply, just turned on his heel and finally managed to make it out the door. On the steps outside the club's front entrance, Sherlock bundled up despite the residual warmth of the spring afternoon hanging in the early evening air. There was the scent of rain to come, but he calculated he could make it the mile and a half to Baker Street before it began. He decided to walk; he needed the time to think, and the ten minute cab ride from St. James' wouldn't be close to adequate. John likely would be waiting at home and Sherlock wanted to be able to provide him with answers, ones that were currently buried in the jumbled mess in his head.

As he strode the near-empty streets of Mayfair, his frustration grew at his inability to wrangle the competing strands of thought into a coherent order. As soon as he grasped one of the threads and untangled it, the others, like snakes in a nest, would re-tangle themselves as his attention was focused elsewhere. Names and phrases and snatches of conversation wrestled for dominance, adding to the chaos.

By the time he traversed Berkeley Square, dodging nannies and dog-walkers, Sherlock had to acknowledge that he’d never be able to untangle the mess without striking at the dark core of it: Magnussen. He needed to reconcile himself with what had led up to that monumental miscalculation. Because there was no avoiding the fact that for recent events, the deductive pathways almost all ended at his own door. Even Blythe’s move against Mycroft had been facilitated by that disastrous error.

Magnussen had been like the oracle in an ancient Greek tragedy. And as was so common in those tales, the course of action taken to subvert the prophecy ended up being the very one which made it happen.

The moment after he'd pulled the trigger, in the blink of an eye between impulse and impact, Sherlock had realised what he'd done. But for the last four months he'd been in denial of that knowledge. Mycroft had been right: now was the time of reckoning, for all their sakes. He could no longer hide behind his half-truth of wanting to help John and Mary. Of course he’d tried to help them, to make all of them safe. But he’d known since Magnussen's visit to Baker Street that the man's principal goal had been to use them all as a daisy chain of pressure points that ended at Mycroft. And Sherlock's first mistake had been allowing himself to downplay that recognition, deceiving himself into believing that it hadn’t mattered, and fooling himself into thinking he could out-manoeuvre both Magnussen and his brother at the same time.

Mycroft’s assertion that they’d had Magnussen “contained” was proof enough of Magnussen’s goal: to break out of that confinement for once and for all and to have even freer rein to destroy the lives of anyone else he wanted. Had Mycroft been the last bulwark against Magnussen, the one person the vermin couldn’t blackmail? Had Mycroft’s sterile and empty life deprived Magnussen of a hold on him other than through Sherlock?

He'd allowed Magnussen to distract him with his sleight-of-hand, the classic magician's trick. The man had played on every prejudice and preconception in Sherlock’s mind: his belief that Mary’s love for John effectively eradicated her past; Sherlock’s belief in Mycroft’s essentially corrupt and complicit nature, and his habitual rejection of his brother’s care; then worst of all, Sherlock’s decades-long refusal to accept that his drug use was destroying his judgement and his belief that Mycroft was the only person in the world clever enough to out-think him. 

Sherlock was forced to admit that his reassurance to John the previous evening, that Magnussen had been wrong, was false. Sherlock’s mistake _had_ torn their world apart. He couldn’t deny anymore his unintentional complicity in the events that led up to Mary and Grace’s deaths, regardless of his intentions. And he couldn’t deny anymore that their deaths had broken his best friend’s heart. Sherlock had failed. He’d failed to keep his vow, and the shame of it piled on the shame at having been fooled by Magnussen both enraged and dismayed him in equal measure.

So where _did_ they go from here? Because he and John were at a fork in the road, and the choice of future path for their friendship was his. John had let him know over the past month that while he was back, he was willing to leave if Sherlock messed up again. John wanted them to be best friends, but he was no longer willing to sacrifice his self-respect for that to happen. He’d shown Sherlock where the line was, and now it was up to him to decide just how much he was willing to flirt with crossing it again.

Ever since developing self-awareness, Sherlock had thought of himself as a risk-taker. To his parents’ and then his brother’s consternation, he’d flung himself at every danger he could find, all in the name of staving off the infernal boredom of life itself. He’d comforted himself with the idea that this was his real addiction: sensation, adrenaline, _the chase_. That the drugs were really nothing more than mental methadone. But this self-deception had hidden an even greater one: that what he was really addicted to was _lies_ , especially the ones he told himself. It was such an ordinary, mundane flaw that Sherlock recoiled at the notion of it. “No one lies like an addict,” Sherlock’s drug-fuelled mind palace reverie had put into the mouth of the simulacrum of his brother, taking on its occasional role as the manifestation of Sherlock’s dormant conscience. 

Ultimately, Sherlock had two choices: lie to John, or tell him the truth about what had led up to the “accident” that had taken so much from him.

Where was the greater risk, Sherlock wondered: the truth now or the possibility of the truth being revealed later? What did he choose: truth and consequences now, or lies now, with the possibility of truth and even greater consequences to come? Would John accept the matrix of causes and effects, the unforeseeable nature of the chain of events that lead from Magnussen's death to Mary and Grace's, or would he think of it as just another of Sherlock's self-serving excuses?

Sherlock knew he should be thinking of the problem as a question of morals, but habit and his nature caused him to convert it into one of probabilities, and once he’d done that he allowed himself to slide into the comfortable familiarity of science, deduction, and calculation. If he chose correctly, he could start to alleviate the consequences of Magnussen’s “prophecy” and finally exorcise the shame that had been his constant companion since Christmas. Because Magnussen would only be right if all of them allowed him to be. If all of them allowed Sherlock’s mistake and its consequences to tear them apart.

By the time he crossed the Marylebone Road and approached home, he knew what he had to do.

As Sherlock strode up the steps of 221b, he heard the television; John was home. He hesitated for a moment, his hand outstretched to the doorknob. Had he made the right choice? 

When he forced himself past his doubts and walked in, John looked up. “Hi. Where've you been?”

“Walking. I spoke to Mycroft.” Sherlock hung up his coat and flopped onto the sofa; he allowed himself to settle for a few seconds, watching John watch television. “We need to talk.”

John glanced over, blanching, but tried to make light of it. “Sounds ominous.”

“It is. Perhaps.”

John squared his shoulders, obviously girding himself for another conflict. “Okay, then. Talk.”

Sherlock drew a deep breath to steady his nerves. “About Mary. And Grace. And about the accident. Why it happened. How it was connected to, well, everything, really.” 

John didn't respond or interrupt; he just listened, his face impassive but intent. The longer Sherlock spoke, the more easily the words came. What started as an awkward, halting trickle of words became a steady stream, then a torrent, and Sherlock felt as though every secret, every scheme, every twist and turn, every blind alley and unexpected connection he revealed to his best friend was like a poisoned arrow drawn from his breast. And through it all John remained silent, focusing carefully on Sherlock's words. Halfway through Sherlock realised that John didn't care that much for what the story was. He cared that Sherlock was sharing all of it, the good, bad and indifferent details that added up to the uprooting and reordering of their lives. And Sherlock was glad to give them to him, all the secrets and lies that had governed his life for the last year, content to be rid of them, once and for all.

The conversation lasted long into the night, and by the end Sherlock knew he had, perhaps, finally managed to prove Magnussen wrong.

~ + ~

the end

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You've reached the end of the line. Congratulations, doughty adventurer!
> 
> I very much hope you enjoyed my S3 hiatus explorations (soon to be entirely jossed by S4). To start off, I'd be remiss without again thanking the lovely dioscureantwins for her herculean efforts to help this series of Byzantine monster fics make sense/not be riddled with unexplained head canon/have the characters recognisable. All the many, many remaining errors/inconsiderate plot devices/bonkers dialogue is entirely my responsibility.
> 
> If you've read this far, thanks for accompanying me on the journey. To those of you who were kind enough to comment along the way, thank you extra double. Writing something this long can be a bit of a slog and at times kind of disheartening; it really meant a lot to me to know that you were enjoying the monstrous beast as it unfolded and that I wasn't sending it into the void to fend for itself entirely alone.
> 
> While this series is complete, I will be writing a few more small fics that take place in this universe. If you're interested in following along with Mycroft's other adventures, you can do so [here](http://archiveofourown.org/series/587278).
> 
> If you have any interest in reading about how I came up with the series, or about the other fics I'm planning to write in this universe, you can do so [ here](http://dognmonkeyshow.livejournal.com/17352.html).
> 
> Cheers!
> 
> Dee


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